Soccer is the most popular sport in the world by some distance, but for all the media attention and money it attracts, the game has remained staunchly against the adoption of technology, consistently rejecting calls for video replays to be introduced despite other sport’s widespread adoption of them.

But not everyone is towing the line. This season, one of the richest and most powerful clubs in England has decided to break from football’s ‘low-tech’ tradition and make technology a central feature of its game.

Manchester City, having just emerged from decades spent in the shadow of its more illustrious neighbor, is bringing big data to football in a bold move that could well force other clubs to follow suit. Not content with landing its first Premier League title in more than forty years last May, Man City’s decision to open up its player data is just the latest in a number of firsts, having recently established public forums on Google+ Hangouts that allow fans to interact with representatives of the club.

The Google+ Hangouts initiative is unlikely to set the soccer world alight, as the forum only allows ten participants at a time to grill the club’s chosen representative, while all anyone else can do is watch the session take place live.

Hardly the most gripping concept, but Man City’s big data meanwhile, holds a lot more promise.

The data comes presented in a .csv format, and is essentially a blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute account of all ‘player action’ events that take place in each of the matches the club plays, according to type of action (pass, shot, save, tackle etc), the teams and players involved, the exact time that each action takes place, and its location on the soccer field. By combining this data, the club is able to create a number of detailed diagrams, including a touch map, heat map, passing map, distribution map and an attacking play map, all of which are free to download.

Man City claim that their data is so rich that it helped the side to claim the Premier League’s best defensive record over the last two seasons, with each defender spending at least 15 minutes before a match assessing his performance in the previous match.

Previously, it’s been possible for others to access this data, but only at a cost. Man City’s decision to make theirs available to one and all is therefore a game-changing move that may well lead to other clubs doing the same. After all, the point of the releasing the data is not to study a team’s strengths and weaknesses – rather, it’s an attempt to reach out to the next “Bill James”, the man whose analytics work arguably revolutionized baseball in the USA.

Manchester City’s game-changing big data

Gavin Fleig, head of performance analysis at Man City, explains:

“Bill James kick-started the analytics revolution in baseball. That made a real difference and has become integrated in that sport. Somewhere in the world there is football’s Bill James, who has all the skills and wants to use them but hasn’t got the data. We want to help find that Bill James, not necessarily for Manchester City but for the benefit of analytics in football. I don’t want to be at another analytics conference in five years’ time talking to people who would love to analyze the data but cannot develop their own concepts because all the data is not publicly available.”

“The whole reason for putting this data out there is to open the doors. The data has value, previously it has been kept in-house and behind guarded doors, but there is a recognition now that clubs need to help this space develop. There are a lot of people out there blogging and doing their own research and they can do a lot more with this data. I hope it will have a big impact on those who want to do research. It might just be the armchair enthusiast. If the worst it does is show a few people that there are different ways of looking at a player’s performance, then great. If it helps universities and gets the blogging world talking and coming up with fantastic ways of modelling performance, that is what we want. We want to engage with them.”

It remains to be seen how successful Man City’s initiative will be, but the club’s initiative in engaging with fans and analysts is an impressive move in itself. And as we have learned before, data analysis can lead to all kinds of surprises – potentially even some that could change the face of the game for good.