Chris Loxston

Founded in early 2020 with a clearly aligned vision, FIFA’s Performance Analysis & Insight team intend to “Improve football understanding and experience by creating Enhanced Football Intelligence through the combination of technical expert observations and football data analytics.”
The appeal is multifaceted, with the ‘football understanding’ facet largely targeted towards coaches, support staff and players, whilst the ‘experience’ aspect refers predominantly to football fans. Our ambition at FIFA has always been to create new, insightful football metrics which can be used live during matches, to enhance the viewing experience.

At the FIFA World Cup in Qatar later this year, we will publicly implement a brand-new series of metrics. Created over a two-year period by our team of Football Data Engineers, Football Data Scientists and Football Performance Analysts, these new Enhanced Football Intelligence metrics will be available to all live data stakeholders and will be visible to fans all around the world on TV screens and other FIFA platforms.
The cornerstone of all our development has been to maintain football context with every metric created. The new datapoints either describe styles of play or have a close link to elements of the game and performance. Over the coming months prior to the start of the World Cup, FIFA will be releasing educational material around these new metrics to allow football fans to have a chance to gain an understand of what these new metrics are and what they mean prior to the first game. Here in this article, we discuss some of these, what they mean, and why they are important in an exclusive and early glimpse into the new dawn of football metrics.