Papers I Rewatch

Liam Kelleher

@liamkicks

12Items

0Likes

These are the PDFs I keep coming back to when the match is over but the brain’s still buzzing. A mix of sports analytics classics, a few QA and stats staples, and some nerdy playbooks for thinking about performance like a coach with a whiteboard and too much coffee. None of this is light reading, but if you like expected goals, error rates, and game theory as much as last‑minute winners, this is the squad list.

See all 12 items Follow Liam KelleherOpen in app

The list

Showing 1–10 of 12

Papers I Rewatch — 10 items
Name	Year	Field	My take
1The Use of Match Statistics that Discriminate Between Successful and Unsuccessful Soccer Teams	2004	Soccer analytics	Old-school but still plays 90 minutes. Before xG went mainstream, this was already showing which stats actually separate winners from also-rans.
2Measuring the Effectiveness of Playing Tactics in Association Football	2010	Tactical analysis	Reads like a coach’s report with a stats degree. Turns vague talk about ‘styles’ into something you can actually measure and argue about.
3The Expected Goals Philosophy	2012	Expected goals	The xG origin story I point people to. Not perfect, but it explains why a 1–0 can be a hiding in plain sight on the shot map.
4Modelling Football Match Results and the Efficiency of Fixed-Odds Betting	1997	Probabilistic modelling	Pre-analytics-era banger. Basic Poisson stuff, but it nails how messy and noisy football scores really are. Good reality check for any model.
5Sparse Representations for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning-Based Player Tracking	2020	Tracking and computer vision	The nerdy side of player tracking. Less about pretty viz, more about how sure we are the dot on screen is actually your left-back.
6A Markov Model for Football Possession and Its Outcomes	2013	Possession modelling	Turns every pass into a state change. Great if you like thinking about build-up play as a series of probability chains rather than vibes.
7The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences	1985	Cognitive bias in sport	The classic party-pooper paper. Kills a lot of ‘he’s on fire’ chat by showing how easily our brains see patterns in pure randomness.
8The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work	2011	Work psychology	Not sport, but feels like training data for motivation. Tiny wins, visible progress, fewer context switches — basically agile done like good coaching.
9Agile Testing: A Roadmap	2007	Software testing	Short, sharp map of how testing fits into agile. Good for explaining to devs why QA isn’t just the poor sod at the end catching dropped balls.
10The Cathedral and the Bazaar	1999	Software engineering	Feels dated in places but the core idea — shipping fast, learning in public — lines up nicely with how good teams iterate tactics over a season.

Conversation

All 2 posts

Join the conversation