I’m a football fanatic and an Arsenal fan, I don’t miss our matches. I’m also a very curious guy (and curious about a lot of things). One notable change in football in the last few years is the “pass-out-from-the-back” tactics most teams do now. I used to get angry anytime we (Arsenal) do this because i just couldn’t understand why my team were(and is still is) adamant on passing out from the back - so when most teams started doing it, i thought to myself (there must certainly be a reason why teams pass out from the back). I mean these guys are professionals and the best in what they do, so if they are doing it, i need to understand why. I decided to start paying more attention to passing moves and read more on tactics. I also started rewatching matches (i will download old matches, and just sit and watch, trying to figure out how teams position themselves when they attack and when they defend. Rewatching matching makes it easier to understand tactics). Then i picked up some books on tactics, on Pep Guardiola (i consider him to be the best tactical manager) and also some books from Jonathan Wilson and Michael Cox. It took a while but it all started to make sense after a while, i could tell what formation a team is using 5 minutes into the match and i also look out for some tactical moves like “overloading on one side of the pitch” .
Over time i became a big fan of Michael cox because he talks about tactics all the time. So i subscribed to the The Athletic, the idea was just to pop in once in a while and read Michael’s articles, you can check his articles here https://theathletic.com/author/michael-cox/. Then i came across an article from this guy in the athletic, and the article had these beautiful visualizations, it was just too beautiful (little secret, i created a folder on my iPhone with screen-shot of his visualizations - i have more than 200 of these visualizations on my phone - that thing about good artists copy, great artists steal ;) ). I was always like, “I could use this visualization for sales data or to visualize top selling products or visualize pageviews”. His articles were so good, that i started digging up his old articles and read (i mean read 2/3 hours on a strech, read every line once or twice to understand his point). His name is Tom Worville, you can check out some of his articles with beautiful visualization here https://theathletic.com/author/tom-worville/ .
I decided to find out how he does his visualization because i have been doing visualization for a long time on (excel, powerbi) and they never looked this good. I reached out to him and found out he uses R for his visualization (now i have heard about R before, i had even taken a course on it but i took it to learn the programming part of it so when he mentioned R, i decided to do some digging on good R books and online courses). Now, 3/4 months later i can’t go a day without programming with R (i mean, literally spend 7/8 hours a day reading R books, reading R codes,reading R documentation + programming then spend another 8/9 hours doing my work - it has been really intense and i love every part of it). Recently in the last few weeks i have been reading Owen Phillips articles and his R codes https://thef5.substack.com/ , he has some beautiful visualization and his expertise is mostly basketball.
I like to think my understanding of R programming has increased tremendously in the last few months. Now, i would say i can’t imagine going a day without using R even if a get a non-related R work, i trust myself to find a way on how to incorporate R into the non-related work).
It’s kind of funny how i got here, from being curious about teams passing out from the back , to reading about tactics to michael cox’s articles to saving tom Worville’s visualizations to digging on books on R to reading Hadley wickham’s books to doing a deep-dive on the gapminder data and doing this. It’s been awesome and i’m just getting started.
Finally, one of my hypothesis in my previous article is that the world is better now more than ever before and i was thinking of how interconnected the world is now. I mean you can read any article on the internet today and reach out to the author/write 10 minutes later, you can work for a company that is thousands of mile away from you - 20/30 years ago this was not possible, it just says a lot about how we have progressed as a human race, and sometimes we need to acknowledge that growth and realize that whether we like it or not, the world will continue to get better and those who have pushed the human race forward are people who acknowledged human progress and thrived to do their part and contribute to the human race – remember that thing steve jobs said about missfits, rebels:
“those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”
I also believe they are the same ones who have acknowledged the human progress. Napoleon acknowledged Julius Cesar and Alexandar the great, Martin Luther King acknowledged Mahatma Ghandhi, Mandela saw the progress of non-violence protests by acknowledging Ghandhi and King. Steve Jobs acknowledged Da Vinci and Picasso, Elon Musk acknowledged Steve Jobs, Guardiola acknowledged Cruyff, When Barbara Tuchman wrote Guns of August and the March of folly, she was acknowledging human progress and also our folly to always make same old mistakes - it’s a never ending trend. Different generation acknowledging the previous generation.
Ending this with a short video which is not related to this article but love it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lb8J5hxPDY .
“You only have to be right once” - [Jay-Z]