This project is an attempt to draw some insights about Arsenal Football Club from a unique perspective. I’ve been a devoted Arsenal fan for almost 15 years, rising early here in the U.S. with a strong cup of coffee to watch games on my laptop via a fuzzy stream. Like a lot of overseas fans of European football teams, most of my connections to the club and to other fans are through blogs, message boards, etc. The undisputed online hub for Arsenal fans has been Arseblog, which has grown to include the blog, podcasts, a news site, multiple feature writers, and much more, including player ratings for each match. Since January of 2014, Arseblog has been collecting fan ratings of each player’s performance in every match.

This project is an attempt to leverage those fan ratings to learn a little bit about player and team performances from the fans’ perspective. I have always been interested in Tom Tango’s Fans Scouting Report which uses fan voting to evaluate baseball players’ defensive abilities and I think that it is a concept that could translate well to evaluating football players. So much of what happens on the pitch is hard to quantify and so much of the punditry is done by people who don’t see most of a team’s matches that I think it makes a lot of sense to turn to the fans’ opinions for a different perspective.

Obviously there are limitations to the fans’ ratings. Anyone who dips a toe into their favorite team’s subreddit or Twitterverse knows that histrionics and hyperbole are often the default states of fans online. While these extreme opinions are certainly represented in the Arseblog ratings, there are a couple of anecdotal factors that lead me to assume that the Arseblog reader community draws from more than just the Angriest Man on Twitter ™ crowd. First, Arseblog is not an obscure blog. It is widely read by Arsenal fans around the world so there should by default be some diversity of opinions in the sample. Second, Andrew Mangan and the rest of the contributors to Arseblog set a tone that I would best describe as “reasonable human being and Arsenal fan”. They recognize that fans are passionate about the club and hold strong opinions but also that a degree of perspective and general respect for your fellow humans doesn’t have to be discarded in order to comment on football matches. Because of this tone to the site content, even the comment section, usually the worst den of iniquity on a website, manages to maintain relative civility.

It remains to be seen exactly what kinds of insights I will be able to draw. For instance, I am not sure whether this data might help us learn more about the players or more about the fans themselves. But in any case, I am excited to pursue those questions with data. Some upcoming posts might include:

  • retroactively naming the Fans’ Favorite Player of the Year for each of the past few seasons
  • retroactively shaming the Fans’ Least Favorite Players of the Year
  • using the ratings and machine learning to highlight those occassions when a win somehow feels like a loss
  • examining the performances in European knockout games
  • much more…

A little more about me: I am working to finish my PhD in Anthropology/Archaeology from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. You can read plenty more about my archaeological work on my academic homepage. Along the way in my PhD program I picked up an interest in data science and programming as a way to ask and answer questions in new ways. I plan to pursue data science and related fields like data journalism when I finish my PhD. This project is a great opportunity for me to practice and enhance my data science skills with a topic that I am very passionate about. It also helps me to step away from my dissertation research in the evenings to give my brain a different set of challenges.

I hope you enjoy the project. If you have any feedback or ideas, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.