Notation or something greater? - An introduction to PA and how it has developed.

You don't have to look that far back in history to see the entirety of analytics' journey from purely statistics that describe a game, to something more inferential wherein coaches and players can begin to create a story of a particular instance and the developments behind it.

Charles Reep (1904 - 2002) is often credited as being the first performance analyst in English football, and his early work with Bernard Benjamin are oft cited pieces of work used to demonstrate how far we have come as a discipline. Reep and Benjamin's (1968) research titled 'Skill and Chance in Association Football' is regarded as a pioneering piece of work that allowed coaches across the English footballing world to start to look at how they could use statistics in order to inform their coaching perspectives.

However, the discipline of Performance Analysis has had many researchers take a more critical standpoint of the art of analysis. Early pieces were often descriptive, and lacked the scientific rigour that was expected of pieces of research at the time. As we look into the world of analysis today, we can see that it is a far greater discipline than anyone could have thought.

Particularly, the world of social media has allowed a new wave of analysts to display their work on sites such as Twitter. The term "fanalysts" is banded around a lot, being someone who breaks down the statistics and tactics behind every one of their team's performances, their transfer window activity, and much much more. This can only be seen as a development in the world of analysis, as it brings the discipline into the forefront of every sports fan's minds. Another example of PA becoming more of a mainstream discipline can be seen in the TV broadcasts of sports. For example, coverage of football matches, be it live or highlights shows, use stats such as Expected Goals (xG) with great frequency. xG was previously a stat usually seen in stats packages given by analysts to coaches to describe the quality of their attempts at goal, but the mainstream attention towards stats like this has allowed the wider world to see analysis as the key discipline in the world of the sports that it truly is.

References:

Reep, C., & Benjamin, B. (1968). Skill and Chance in Association Football. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), 131(4), 581. https://doi.org/10.2307/2343726