Shooting profiles: using event data to find similar players

I’m rather fascinated by finding similar players with data or finding players that are closest to a particular role. This is working quite well and it’s about finetuning so the eye test matches my similarity models. But, of course, this is only limited to a particular kind of data and I want to take it one step further: event data.

In one of my previous articles I spoke about similar players to Erling Haaland and that’s something I will do now too. Only this time, I’m going to focus on event data and find a shooting profile that is similar.

Ranking players: Percentile ranks, Z-Scores and Similarities

Method

These similarity models were calculated on Wyscout general data and look at the qualitative and quantitative data of every player, but without the context op position and aim. In this article I want to look at event data. In specific, I want to find similar player to Erling Haaland, who have a similar shooting profile.

This means I will compare the shot locations of the players and also the xG generated from those locations. The data is from Premier League…