Okay, so I dove into this little project today: “san jose earthquakes vs chicago fire fc player ratings.” Sounded kinda fun, and I was curious to see what I could dig up and how I could mess around with the data.
First things first, I needed to actually find the data. I spent a bit digging around on some sports stats sites, you know, the usual suspects. Scraped some player ratings and match data from a few different sources. Let me tell you, getting it all clean and in a usable format? A bit of a pain. Lots of copy-pasting, some quick and dirty scripts to clean things up. Nothing fancy, just getting the job done.
Once I had the data somewhat wrangled, I loaded it into a spreadsheet. I’m talking Google Sheets, old school. I wanted to see the raw numbers, filter by team, and just get a feel for what I was dealing with. Started poking around, looking at average ratings, top performers, and all that jazz.
Then, I started messing with some basic calculations. What’s the average rating for each team? What’s the distribution of player ratings look like? Simple stuff, but it gives you a good starting point. I even tried to plot some histograms to visualize the data. My spreadsheet skills are… adequate, let’s say.
I wanted to see if there were any correlations. Like, does a higher average rating lead to more wins? I tried to plot some stuff, but honestly, with the limited data I had, it was hard to draw any real conclusions. More data would definitely be needed for anything meaningful.
I even tried to see if I could identify any key players. Who are the consistently high performers? Who are the players who seem to have a big impact on the team’s overall performance? This involved a little more digging and some subjective analysis, but it was interesting to see if the numbers backed up what I was seeing.
Towards the end, I started thinking about how I could make this more… presentable. Maybe throw it into a simple dashboard or something. I didn’t get that far today, but it’s definitely on my list of things to try. Maybe next time, I’ll actually try using a real database and some proper data visualization tools. But for now, spreadsheets and a bit of elbow grease had to do the trick.
Overall, it was a fun little project. Nothing groundbreaking, but I learned a thing or two, and that’s always a win. Plus, I got to nerd out about soccer for a few hours. Can’t complain about that!
