Manchester City FC Analytics make OPTA data publicly available

In a move to stimulate the analytics community, Manchester City Football Club have teamed up with English Premier League statistics provider OPTAPro to release a full data set of Premier League players for the 2011-2012 season. The MCFC Analytics project has been created to harness some of the amazing talent out there in the analytics community and provide fresh ways of analysing OPTA’s performance data.

As a carrot on the end of the stick, the best submitted projects will be featured on both the MCFC Analytics page and OPTAPro’s website. In addition to this, those with the best projects will be invited to present their work at Manchester City’s training ground and take in the match day experience alongside the club’s performance analysis department.

Performance Analysis in sport is a hugely important discipline, used all over the world in sports from American Football to Ice Hockey to “regular football” or soccer, to the unenlightened. The 2011 film “Moneyball” dramatised the real-life application of the field to baseball, specifically the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team.

This is an excellent opportunity for those with an interest in the performance analysis field, or simply those of us who work with data and have an interest in football, to put some of their skills to use in a real-world situation, using real-life data from last season. You can register for free on the MCFC Analytics page for access to the data set.

Let me know in the comments below if you’ve registered and feel free to share any thoughts on the project itself, or what you’re planning on doing with the data.