mark thompson

@markposts.bsky.social

4590 Followers 695 Following

data software engineer @ Twenty3 Sports || sport for all || (he/him) || ⚽🎾💻📰🏎️🤖 - mrkthmpsn.github.io

Screenshot of get goalside analytics dot com, showing a rebrand and nifty reading progress features
futi app xG timeline of Switzerland vs Colombia, 66 minutes into the game -- the teams have 0.63 and 0.44 xG respectively, while the chart has a Y axis going up to 2.0, leaving a large amount of space in the top half of the chart, indicating a dull game
Half time stats for Germany vs Paraguay. Germany had 79% possession but ended the half on 0.14 xG, less than Paraguay's 0.25xG
Scatterplot of time in the final third during teams' matches and the median share of final third time in that team's favour, for teams in 5 women's football leagues in 2023-2024. Barcelona sit close to 85%, while the top teams from other leagues are around 70-75%; NWSL teams all pretty much sit in a 40-60% band, the only league without clear outliers
Twin heatmaps of women's leagues and men's leagues in the datasets for first and second half added time; men's dataset has a strong concentration in 0-2 minutes first half and 4-5 minutes second half added time played, while women's is far less strongly concentrated, with main concentration being 1-4 minutes first half and 4-7 minutes second half
Scatterplot of in-play time and share of game-time in-play of teams from 5 2023-2024 women's leagues, the 2023 World Cup, and 2025 Euros. with datapoints coloured by competition. The 2023 World Cup is like a strip all by itself north-west of the rest of the distribution, while the WSL teams all occupy the top-right quadrant of the scatterplot
A google scholar search box with 'jabulani football', a reference to the infamous ball used in the 2010 men's World Cup
A cryptic screenshot of a partial scatterplot, showing 'Barcelona WFC' in an isolated top-right corner. Diagonally closest to it are 'Chelsea FCW, Arsenal WFC, and Juventus W'. In the top-left of the screenshot is 'Spain Women's' and bottom-right of the screenshot is 'Manchester City WFC'
A website landing page with an F1 timing tower-style menu navigation of projects on the left-hand side. A preview panel cycles through each item. Behind it in the background is an animation of football tracking data and defensive compactness signifiers.
Shapes representing PSG and Arsenal, and Arsenal's two banks of four sandwich
Image representing PSG shape in Arsenal half, like an inverted trapezium, while Arsenal's shape represented by a small rectangle, and a player point to represent David Raya
Three paragraphs from the linked article in the quoted post, introducing the concept of 'world models', in relation to large language models, using Artemis II's slingshot around the moon usings its gravity as a metaphor
Scatterplot of ball in play time and total restarts across Statsbomb open data dataset, showing a general correlation between lower restarts and more in-play time, with average in-play time around 52-55 minutes
LLM agent rules for reply and mentions of other users, based around direct interaction and a hierarchy of knowing somebody.
Lauren James' shot map from FotMob, one from around 15 yards out on an angle, the others around 25 yards out
Football competition options on the Opta Analyst site, with the WSL second-last on the list ahead of the Saudi Pro League
Derby vs Leeds shot map after 16 minutes, each team have one shot just inside the box and just left of the six-yard box width
Shot map from Fotmob with xG stats, 0.3 for Arsenal and 0.21 for Liverpool
A screenshot of the 'BBC Verify' update about social media videos, found in full via the link in the post. Its four paragraphs conclude: "Our recency checks on each of the videos confirm they first surfaced online today. In the footage a burgundy car moves as three shots ring out. Seconds later it crashes into two parked cars."
A screenshot of an 'entity explore' page, where the entity of 'Joke' has been searched and selected. (It belongs to the category 'abstract concept'). A list of jokes from various blog posts are displayed, including "So, if you're logging onto your SoccerPlatform2027, will you want to look at 'Attack' or 'Final Phase Chance Creation' or 'sexy vibe xT aura farming'" (a reference to Spotify algorithmic playlist titles)
A screenshot of an 'entity' list, showing entities in different categories and the number of mentions. The category 'Abstract concepts' is open, showing 'information flow' and, the entity which is highlighted, 'Joke'.
Bar chart of Nottingham Forest's line-breaking passes completed; Anderson accounts for 30.6% (per the linked article) and leads the chart on 101, with the next nearest player on 33, followed by five players in the low-to-mid 20s
Following a seventh-place finish and a qualification spot for the Conference League with the youngest team in Europe’s top five leagues, many are curious about Rosenior’s approach to the game. Outside of a daily 10.30am meeting, scheduling is loose. Coaching staff opt against setting specific times for training, instead waiting for the playing squad to feel at their most relaxed and ready following pre-activation and warm-up routines. Strasbourg players are not given curfew times, nor fines for arriving late. “I don’t think there’s been one player late in my 15 months here, because they respect the fact that I’ve given them the trust in other areas,” adds the head coach.
A search for 'specialist coaches' on The Athletic, returning articles on Tottenham specialists (a good result), Chauncey Billups arrest, Thomas Frank discussing Cristian Romero injury, and NBA coverage on Amazon Prime (three bad search results)
SIMON: I mean, if a writer wants to play around with AI as the writer and see if it helps him, I mean, I regard it as no different than him having a thesaurus or a dictionary on his desk or a book of quotable quotes. Play around with it. If it starts to lead the way in the sense that a studio exec comes to you and says, AI gave us this story that we want, that's not why I got into storytelling. And it's not where I'll stay if that's what storytelling is. SHAPIRO: You've been through past writer's strikes. Were there lessons those experiences taught you that you think are relevant today? SIMON: Oh, yeah. The one that is fundamental today is they are now telling us, we don't know what AI is. We don't know how good it's going to be. Let's not litigate what AI can do, what it can't do. SHAPIRO: You think they're hiding their cards. SIMON: Of course. They did the same thing in 2007 when it was streaming. And so yeah, this is - we're having the same exact fight as in 2007. Technology is different, but the fight has to be the same. It's going to be a long fight. I think this is going to go on a while. This is the fight. This is now. This has to happen now. SHAPIRO: David Simon is a TV writer and showrunner known for "The Wire," "Homicide," "Treme" and more. He's also a member of the Writers Guild of America's Negotiating Committee. Thank you so much for coming into the studio.
An animation of tennis datapoints (from McEnroe vs Borg 1980 Wimbledon final tie-break), seen from the perspective of one baseline with a slow, smooth zoom and angle perspective change. Produced with matplotlib
Premier League table sorted by xG difference; promoted teams Sunderland, Leeds, and Burnley are 12th, 15th, and 20th respectively
Animation of shot locations in an iconic Alcaraz-Sinner point at Indian Wells in 2024, where both players covered the court incredibly in just nine shots
Data visualisation of an iconic Indian Wells point between Alcaraz and Sinner, where the played incredible angles and covered the court from corner to corner in the space of nine shots combined.
View of the McEnroe vs Borg tie-break data visualisation sweeps from a low angle shot behind a baseline to a high, approaching birds-eye, view, while the court rotates.
Data visualisation from a 'TV camera' viewpoint of tennis data, visualising Borg vs McEnroe serve-plus-one shot locations from their 1980 Wimbledon epic tie-break. Their names are plotted in dynamic large type on the image, as if painted on-court
A sweeping camera shot over a tennis court data vis of serve plus one locations in McEnroe vs Borg's 1980 Wimbledon tie-break, a 3-second video starting from behind one baseline and sweeping upwards
Tennis court visualisation from a "player view" perspective (although more like someone stood 20 feet behind a player), showing serve-plus-one locations from Borg vs McEnroe's 1980 Wimbledon tie-break. Shots on the far side of the court are rendered behind a partially transparent net
Side-on view of the tennis court plot of McEnroe vs Borg serve-plus-one shots
Plot of locations on a tennis court. Serve-volleying is clearly evident, although Borg has some shots near the baseline. McEnroe's locations are more spread, suggesting better returning from Borg.
Screenshot of a bluesky feed creator service with an unpublished feed titled 'ref-chat'
Screenshot reading six paragraphs: "Sometimes in journalism, the act of day-in day-out reporting of events, it is so easy to get distracted, to miss the wood for the trees; to get lost in the latest tweet, the latest here-today, gone-tomorrow fiasco, the most recent bit of noise. We can be very bad, by contrast, at seeing, at talking about, at reporting on the trends which historians will one day say were the defining elements of our age. AI, the coming wave of artificial intelligence married with robotics is our printing press, our steam engine our atomic bomb, our generation's singular contribution to humanity s development. In fact, it could be if you believe some theorists, the last thing humanity ever does. A couple of weeks ago I attended AI4, the world's biggest AI conference in Las Vegas. One of the godfathers of AI tech, Sir Geoffrey Hinton, was the keynote speaker. Hear what he had to say about the precipice our race might now stand upon: "We've somehow got to be stronger than them. We've got to be dominant and they've got to be submissive. That's not gonna work: they're going to be much smarter than us " Think about that. We may be about to invent technology - AGI, artificial general intelligence - which is cleverer than us; which at a stroke denudes the one advantage our race has had from the beginning: that we can outwit everything else around us in this world, even when they're stronger than us. It's why the gorillas are in the zoo, and you're listening to this."
One post on live football chat feed saying that every pundit will say "he's like a new signing" about Chiesa over the next few days. The post below, posted 20 seconds earlier, reads: "HE'S LIKE A NEW SIGNING"
Reaction to the Yougov poll about the percentage of men who think they are fairly or very likely to score a penalty against Jordan Pickford or Hannah Hampton, saying "yikes... I reckon 33% of men is maybe about right for scoring a penalty with no goalkeeper at all"
A 5-second video with the words 'hello world' animated onto a background image. The words enter the screen character by character with a short, split-second delay, and animate with slight movement between frames
Holmgren beat Watanuki 6-4, 6-7, 3-6, 7-6, 7-6. The final two tie-breaks had scores of 13-11 and 10-7
Mobile screenshot of get goalside analytics dot com. A clean but approachable and simple style of homepage with a tagline, subscribe call to action, featured post, and recent posts list
Chart of Premier League team yearly player amortisation change from 2018-2019 to 2023-2024. Many clubs have increases in the range of 20 to 60 million pounds, but Liverpool only a 2.7million increase. And the real outlier on the chart is Everton, with a decrease of 30.5million
Screenshot of the standard with half the page devoted to an ad, an ad overlay over another quarter, and a navigation overlay on one side
Landing page of the BBC 'live' post for the UK-EU trade deal. At the top is a header image of Kier Starmer, above a 'Watch live' link. The bottom half of the screen is a summary linking to other stories.
If you’ve ever heard a manager pooh-pooh the idea of formations (‘telephone numbers’), you’ll know that tactics are in the eye of the beholder. [A sidenote: I would pray that everybody keeps in mind the love they hold for the ‘fluidity of football’ next time they ask for stats about ‘goals/shots from set-pieces’. Nobody knows when a set-piece becomes open-play. If God had wanted there to be clear delineation between phases, he’d have invented the NFL.]
Screenshot of ChatGPT asking for news about Pope Francis citing news articles. Various paragraphs have links out to sites such as CNN and People dot com
A ChatGPT output in slightly painfully over-metaphored prose about Robert E Lee in the voice of 'football blogger Mark Thompson'
Football notes app, showing a stat screen with a calendar of the days where a match has been logged and average ratings of some teams
A live football analysis dashboard, with a key frame timeline, tracking data visualiser, updating metrics, and metrics chart
A question for Get Goalside readers: Which of the following is the more likely winner of the next three-to-five years? 1) Interoperability between data providers becomes seamless on its own, allowing for integration of different data sources within a provider’s own product, or allowing for foolproof entity matching between any provider to use data in third-party applications like Tableau 2) Organisations will turn to cloud providers like AWS for API integration and setting up data storage, either through some (semi-)automation (AI anyone??) or as an affordable managed service 3) The above, but provided by domestic leagues or national FAs 4) The scale of the task will have simply shrunk enough for clubs of all sizes to hire employees for the set-up and maintenance of data pipelines, and creation of internal tools 5) None of the above, it’ll be as complex as always Something else
Screenshot: "it's always weird realising that people will pay more for a blank Moleskine notebook than for a novel."
Screenshot from my hobby football notes app, table of average ratings for Premier League teams I've watched more than once since mid-February. Manchester City and Arsenal are second and third bottom respectively; Manchester United are second (behind Liverpool)
Screen recording showcasing a search function in my football notes hobby app. It searches team names, custom categories, and game notes, returning a list of matches where the search term featured and allowing the user to tap through to that match.
Premier League fourth to seventh place. Chelsea on 52 points, Man City and Aston Villa on 51, Newcastle on 50. Chelsea and City have a game in hand compared to Villa, while Newcastle have two.
Screenshot of a football notes app stats page, showing a table of teams watched, with their count of matches and average rating
Screen recording filtering the 'Drama' note - tonight's Forest vs United match is one and Atleti 1 Real Madrid 0 from the Champions League is the other
Screen recording of a football notes taking app, ahead of Nottingham Forest vs Manchester United. Neither team has an average rating over 2.7 out of 5