Okay, so today I’m gonna talk about my little experiment with FC Kuressaare. Yeah, the Estonian football club. Don’t ask me why, I just felt like messing around with some football data.
First things first, I needed data. I started by scraping some basic info off their website – you know, player names, positions, that kind of stuff. It was a real pain, honestly. The site wasn’t exactly built for easy scraping. Lots of manual cleaning involved, which I absolutely hate.
Then I tried to find some match statistics. This was even harder! Official stats were scattered all over the place, in different formats. Ended up piecing together data from a couple of different sports websites. It was messy, and I’m still not 100% sure everything lines up perfectly. Data quality is always a headache, isn’t it?
Once I had some usable data (or what I hoped was usable), I threw it into a spreadsheet. I’m no data scientist, okay? Excel is my weapon of choice. Started doing some basic analysis. Goals scored, assists, that kind of thing. Nothing fancy.
Here’s where it got a bit more interesting. I wanted to see if there were any patterns in their game. Like, did they tend to score more in the first half or the second? Did certain players have a higher shot accuracy? Tried to visualize some of this stuff with charts. My charts looked like garbage, but they gave me a rough idea.
I even tried to predict the outcome of their next match! Completely unscientific, based purely on gut feeling and a few flimsy stats. I was way off, of course. Proves you can’t just rely on numbers, you need actual football knowledge, which I clearly lack.
Lessons learned? Data is messy, football analysis is harder than it looks, and my Excel skills are probably stuck in 2010. But hey, it was a fun little project. Might try another team next time, maybe one with better-organized data. Or maybe I’ll just stick to watching the games instead of trying to analyze them.
- Data scraping is a time sink.
- Cleaning data is even more of a time sink.
- Football stats are surprisingly hard to find in a consistent format.
Next Steps (Maybe?)
Honestly, probably not. But if I were to do it again, I’d try to:
- Find a better data source.
- Learn some actual data analysis techniques.
- Use a real programming language instead of Excel.
But yeah, that’s the FC Kuressaare story. A bit of data, a bit of frustration, and a whole lot of wasted time. But hey, that’s what hobbies are for, right?
