Soccer Analysis Summary on Behind the Net redux

I've written a bunch of content over the last couple of weeks and it's probably a bit much to find what you're looking for in the midst of it. So this is an attempt to organize and highlight the most salient bits of analysis.

I'd call these nine pieces "general" work, since they deal with the fundamentals of ball possession and shot totals. The fundamental takeaways from these pieces are: 1) Ball Possession is very important; 2) So is passing into the offensive zone; 3) Teams shoot more when they're losing; 4) Having a player sent off completely distorts the game. These are all obvious concepts, but the intent here is to put some numbers on what we know about soccer.

The second set of analytical pieces relates to shooting. Here I've looked at where players shoot from, how often they score, where they put the ball in the net, and also what the fundamental limit is for shot distance.

The third set of pieces is World Cup specific analysis, first by group:

And then generically:

It's a bit more difficult to draw conclusions from single games in the World Cup, but we can still see trends over the course of 90 minutes.

Talking Points