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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.
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 2022–2023 and the data comes from Opta. All of the data is collected on July 18th, 2023. The expected goals numbers are generated with my own model and is considered slightly more generous than Opta, but not to the extent of Wyscout’s model.
Shotmap Erling Haaland
So, I want to look at the shooting profile. That means I’m going to look at the shot location data from Haaland.
What we can see is that he 123 shots in the whole season with a corresponding xG of 30,27. That means he is overperforming his xG with + 5,73. We can also see that most of his shot comes from the central areas in the penalty area.
If we want to look for a player that maybe doesn’t have the number of goals, but does come in the same…
