Update Four of our summer development programme is imminent, so I thought I’d bring you an early preview of the new feature introduced in this round of changes – the Fantasy Football Scout heatmaps.
While you may be familiar with the use of heatmaps in football as a means of displaying player touches in a single match, we wanted to go further.
As our members know, we enable our Opta data to be displayed per match, across the season or indeed over a number of intervals. These include all home or away matches, or even the last two, four and six matches or Gameweeks – home or away.
By ensuring that our heatmaps could also be built and displayed for these intervals, we were able to increase their scope significantly.
Firstly, this meant that would could create meaningful heatmaps for events other than just touches.
Because we could visualise data over a group of matches, or even the season, there was some real value in mapping events such as shots, chances created and passes received, among others.
These really came alive when we built heatmaps into our comparison tools.
This enables us to view patterns in player behaviour – analysing queries such as “where has Alexis Sanchez received passes in his last four home matches, compared with away matches”.
The answer is below.
Alexis Sanchez Passes Received Last Four Home vs Last Four Aways
As you can see, Sanchez received the majority of his passes out on the left flank over his last four away matches, while he took up more central positions when receiving the ball at the Emirates.
This is the kind of analysis that is now possible, confirming information that has been difficult to decipher or collect previously – other than by watching all of Sanchez’s previous matches, of course.
But our heatmaps can also be applied to teams and, in this way, Fantasy managers can analyse pairings created by forthcoming fixtures and attempt to identify areas of strength and weakness.
For example, AFC Bournemouth travel to West Brom for Gameweek 1 and, analysing their heatmaps for last season (all matches), we can find some areas of potential for the visitors.
West Brom Challenges Lost vs Bournemouth Successful Take-ons – 2016/17 Season
West Bromwich Albion’s lost challenges are mapped on the left, indicating that they were more susceptible to being beaten by attackers on the right-side of their defence.
Equally, if we look at Bournemouth’s map of successful take-ons – when a player beats his defender – we see that the Cherries are particularly strong down their left flank.
We can therefore deduce that West Brom’s Craig Dawson may be targeted by Ryan Fraser and Charlie Daniels in this match and that they may get some joy in this area, perhaps even some Fantasy returns.
These are just two examples of how the feature can be used to improve your analysis of teams and players.
I’ve also produced a preview movie showing further cases and illustrating the heatmaps in action.
Heatmaps are currently on our test server and will be made available to our members as part of Update Four, which is due to go live later this week.
Heatmaps Preview Movie
A reminder that, if you want access to this forthcoming update and other future additions to the members’ area, you can sign up for the new season now for our pre-season price of £12.50 (RRP £15.00).
Existing registered users can upgrade via this link. New users, who are yet to get a registered account, can sign up via this link.
If you’re new to the benefits of Fantasy Football Scout membership, you can get full details, along with a series of movies previewing the content, via this page.
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