How I Used StatsBomb Open Data to Test a Soccer Theory Nobody Had Checked at Scale (opens in new tab)

A methodology-first look at 1,085 matches, 41 competitions, and one number that keeps showing up: 79.3% I want to tell you exactly how I did this, because the methodology matters more than the finding. That's a weird thing to lead with. Most sports analytics pieces bury the methods in footnotes or skip them entirely. They give you the headline number, maybe a chart, and then ask you to trust them. I've read hundreds of those pieces. I've written a few. And I've learned that the number without...