Pieter Robberechts

Our Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA) will happen again as part of @ecmlpkdd.org! 📅 7 or 11 Sept 2026 📍 Naples, Italy 📝 Submissions due 5 June 2026 \w @hugoriosneto.bsky.social @azimmermdm.bsky.social & Maaike Van Roy dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/events/MLSA26/

How long do actions echo? ⚽️🔊 🇮🇹 A few weeks ago I was back at the #MLSA workshop, held during ECML/PKDD in Napoli. 🔜 I presented our latest study on possession value frameworks, where we analyse the “near future” over which the effect of an action is measured.

A model-heavy newsletter today, with lots of thoughts on the decisions we make when building something. This week's Post-Match Report:

𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐩 𝟐.𝟎 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞. 🇪🇺🇺🇸 Following the success of the first edition, PySport and @skillcorner.bsky.social are inviting the analytics community to work with open-source 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 (including body pose data) and 𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 to turn new ideas into open-source projects with real value.

In the last chapter of her PhD thesis Lotte Bransen looked at penalty kicks. Several interesting things emerged. A simulation study indicated slightly higher save percentage if the goalkeeper did not always align directly in the center of the goal. 1/5

📝 dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/... w/ @probberechts.bsky.social @jessejdavis.bsky.social

🥾⚽️ As noted by, e.g., @zonal-marking.bsky.social a strange trend of the 2026 World Cup is teams deliberately booting the ball out of play from kick-off. With the @royalbelgianfa.bsky.social we looked into this in 2024 for the @statsbomb.com conference.

Our 2026 World Cup predictions are live! 🔮 🇪🇸 Spain (24%) is the clear favourite, followed by 🇦🇷 Argentina (17%), 🇫🇷 France (11%), 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England (7%) and 🇧🇷 Brazil (5%). Explore every team’s path to the final in our interactive 👇 w/ @jessejdavis.bsky.social dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/world...

If you are interested in Bayesian analysis and the Bayesian framework in general (which you should imo) I've put together an open course on coursera. Check it out here: www.coursera.org/specializati... #Bayesian #MachineLearning #DataScience

What if you could simply “prompt” a model with a few shots and get accurate xG predictions? #TabPFN is making waves on academic benchmarks. We tested how it handles a real-world sports analytics problem. w/ Timo Martens & @jessejdavis.bsky.social dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

⏳ The submission deadline for our MLSA workshop is coming up soon: June 5, 2026 (just two weeks away)! Don’t miss the chance to share your ongoing research ideas or recent work on Sports+AI!

This is a reminder that you can still register for our #socceranalytics symposium. We have a great set of speakers! www.kuleuven.be/liss/events/...

Don't miss the deadline for the LISS Football Analytics Symposium! Here are 3 reasons to get that abstract in 👇 1️⃣ Make an impact: Present your work directly to club analysts 2️⃣ Low effort: 2-page abstract (published research welcome!) 3️⃣ Learn from 4 of my favourite speakers on soccer analytics

We’re recruiting for a Data Engineer to join our Research team at Liverpool FC. In my (perhaps biased) view, it’s a great opportunity to join an excellent team, work at the forefront of sports analytics, and have a tangible impact. www.linkedin.com/posts/conorq...

⚽Event Announcement⚽ Leuven Institute of Sport Science’s #FootballAnalytics Symposium will take place on April 23! Current invited speakers are Prof. Pascal Bauer (DFB, USaarland) and @unravelsports.bsky.social Abstract submission closes on Feb 26 @ 17:00 CET www.kuleuven.be/liss/events/...

It’s that time of year again: proposals are now being accepted to present at Opta Forum 2026, which is taking place in London at the end of March. If you are interested in taking part, the submission deadline is 9th February. Full details can be found ⬇️ www.statsperform.com/resource/opt...

Continuing the tradition, I have compiled an end-of-year overview of the soccer analytics content that I liked the most in 2025. This edition includes pointers to about 200 resources, including research papers, blog posts, news articles, podcasts, and webinars. janvanhaaren.be/posts/soccer...

Can we measure the ability to block dangerous passes in soccer? ⛔️⚽️ We recently presented our latest research paper "Quantifying Off-Ball Defensive Impact through Cover Shadows" at the Hudl Performance Insights 2025 Conference: 📺 youtu.be/kf6far1Zst8?... 📝 static.hudl.com/craft/perfor...

We're expanding the Club Brugge Football Data Science team. As our Football Data Scientist, you'll work with one of the most advanced analytics infrastructures in football to help management, scouting, and analysis staff turn data into better decisions. jobs.clubbrugge.be/en/football-data-scientist

IMPECT released a season of public event data! ⚽ There’s already plenty of event data out there — so why care? Because IMPECT’s data adds some really cool and unique features, such as their Packing Zones. And with the new kloppy v3.18 release, it's really easy to get started with this dataset.

We’re excited to launch the 𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐗 𝐏𝐲𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐂𝐮𝐩 - a hackathon-style challenge that will bring together the community to collaborate, compete, and innovate using open-source SkillCorner data. 👉 Sign up pysport.org/analytics-cup

Top stuff once again. Bringing validity to the conversation which is too often overlooked in the football analysis space.

Before an app launches, it undergoes usability testing. Why shouldn't an advanced sports metric? In our latest blog, we propose 4 criteria: 1️⃣ Trustworthy 2️⃣ Novel 3️⃣ Intuitive 4️⃣ Useful Then, we put VAEP to the test... \w @jessejdavis.bsky.social & Maaike Van Roy dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

We can use xG to compute post-hoc win-draw-loss probabilities. Our new blogpost shows MCMC's estimates of these probabilities are unstable, computing them exactly is faster than approximating them, and MCMC's runtime strongly depends on its implementation. dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

Looking forward to the #MLSA25 workshop next week at @ecmlpkdd.org! We'll have some exciting research on soccer, ultimate frisbee, basketball and table tennis. ⚽🥏🏀🏓 Want a sneak peek? The papers are already available on the workshop website 👇

The Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference is an annual event dedicated to highlighting the latest sports research from the statistics and data science community. Registration for the 2025 CMSAConference is open. 🔗 www.cmsaconference.com

“What if, when the opposition has 11 players behind the ball, a centre-back decided it was more worthwhile to ‘kick for touch’ rather than attempt to play through midfield?” Oh boy do I have a research presentation for you

Excited to announce a new paper together with @sigridolthof.bsky.social entitled "Perspectives on data analytics for gaining a competitive advantage in football: computational approaches to tactics". This is a synthesis article that has 3 key objectives www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.... 1 / 4

🔷 𝐏𝐲𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐗 𝐏𝐲𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐄𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐚𝐥𝐬! 🔶 On December 9th @PyData Eindhoven and @pysport.org will organize 𝐏𝐲𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐄𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓! 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨: lnkd.in/eBGWKs3V

Your fave women’s footie analytics gals (@cata-bush.bsky.social and myself, ofc) are at it again! Below is a VAEP inspired breakdown of the Women’s Euros group stages - read to see which players and teams have shown out or bombed (whoops, Netherlands 👀): open.substack.com/pub/beyondth...

Our Women's Euro 2025 predictions are out! 🔮 Spain 🇪🇸 is our model's favorite to win the title, with Germany 🇩🇪 close behind. Meanwhile, Belgium 🇧🇪 will most likely be eliminated in the group stage. w\ @jessejdavis.bsky.social dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

We're looking for an ML Engineer to join our team at Sportec Solutions. Lots of exciting projects in the pipeline, including ones with skeletal-tracking data. Apply or pass it on to someone who might be interested! sportec-solutions.jobs.personio.de/job/2151299?...

🚀 Ingestify 0.7.0 is live Parsing football data with kloppy is fun. The hard bit is fetching raw files and keeping them clean and version-safe. That’s the gap Ingestify fills. github.com/PySport/inge...

I strongly believe biomechanical analysis will be the next big leap in sports analytics—and not just for the pros. I got a glimpse by testing the @runeasi.bsky.social sensor (a @dtai-kuleuven.bsky.social spin-off) and wrote about how it helped during my marathon training → runeasi.ai/my-marathon-...

Had the pleasure of attending the Linköping Hockey Analytics Conference this week. Thought “icing” was just for cakes, but somehow they still let me on stage 😅 Loved the welcoming community and saw lots of familiar ideas with huge potential across sports. #LINHAC

I’m honored by @leanderalphabet.bsky.social excellent write up of our soccer research! Lots of credit to my wonderful collaborators @janvanhaaren.be @wannesm.bsky.social @probberechts.bsky.social Maaike Lotte Tom @lorenzocascioli.bsky.social @hugoriosneto.bsky.social Max Arne Tim & so many others

The Belgian lab shaping modern soccer’s data revolution