Inside soccer's data renaissance

Many of the insights hitting soccer pitches today trace back to Jesse Davis and a team of computer scientists open-sourcing tools for some of the sport's trickiest problems. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent's end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer since its inception more than a decade ago. Though the research group brings machine-learning models to bear on a variety of sports--including basketball, volleyball, and field hockey--nowhere is its impact felt more than on the soccer pitch.