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What Futi tells us: a conversation with John Muller of Futi.live
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John Muller of Futi.live joins Jeremiah to talk about his new app, Futi which aims to go beyond other similar scoring or statistical apps. They discuss the technical foundations and data sources of the application, as well as the advanced models and new stylistic models being introduced. The two also analyze the Sounders style of play through the lens of the Futi data.
Follow John Muller on BlueSky and the Futi.live.
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Transcript
Introduction and Will Bruin's New Role
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Will Bruin, and I was just recognized as a Seattle Sounders legend. Now I get to do voice reads for the Sounder at Heart podcast network. Here we go.
00:00:11
Speaker
Come
Celebrating Seattle Sounders as MLS Cup Winners
00:00:12
Speaker
on. Hey, O'Shaughness. Let's The Seattle Sounders have done it. MLS Cup winners. The Sounders rule the region.
00:00:43
Speaker
Ooch of a gooch! All creatures, great and small! Rothrock gonna collect it, he does just about, runs into the advertising order. Low to our left, ball goes in! Oh, what a goal! Where's my copy? got bunch of them How many do you cost them? 50 bucks.
00:01:08
Speaker
I'll deadline you.
Sponsorship and Partnerships
00:01:18
Speaker
This episode of Nos Arietes is sponsored by Full Pull Wines, a Seattle-based wine retailer and proud sponsor of Nos Arietes since 2011. Full Pull was founded in 2009, is based in Seattle, and is owned and operated by longtime Sounder supporters.
00:01:32
Speaker
They offer the best boutique wines of the world to members of their mailing list, with special focus on their home, Pacific Northwest.
Introduction to Footy with John Mueller
00:01:44
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of Adiates on the Sounder at Heart podcast network. I'm Jeremiah Shan. Joining me today is John Mueller of footy or Fuchi apparently however you want to say it.
00:01:57
Speaker
ah Man, I'm on a podcast called Nos Audietes, and you're asking me how to pronounce footy? No, no, no. I'm not making fun. I'm saying that it's clever because you can pronounce it whatever your language of choice is. That's right. Yeah, it's it's international.
00:02:13
Speaker
Exactly. no i my name Our name, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it right, let alone what i what other people say. So I think yours is great. ah But anyway, welcome to the show, John.
00:02:26
Speaker
Thanks. It's good be here. Yeah, so this is, if in case people don't know, Footy, that's why I'm going with Footy because that's the that's what sounds the most natural to me.
Footy's Advanced Analytics
00:02:36
Speaker
ah What Footy is, is essentially a new type of stat site, I think. Is ah is that a fair way of of explaining it?
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, so it's it's a mobile app that's like whatever you already use to check scores and stats, like FopMob, SofaScore, you know, there are a million of those apps that all kind of look and and feel the same. Ours is structured like that, but underneath the hood, it's powered by the kinds of models that team analytics departments use to understand how players play, how teams play, and hopefully give you a sort of deeper, you know, tactical and data-based understanding of the game.
00:03:10
Speaker
And so, so far, you know, we've done a few stories already using some of the data that you guys have collected. What are you, like what is your hope for this site? Is it something that is being used by teams? is it something that that sort of bridges the gap between what ah consumers or fans are using and what teams are using? Or is it something that you really hope is like a fan focused, you know, ah display? Yeah.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, so the app is for everybody. Even though the data is more advanced than what people have access to currently, i think it speaks to questions that everybody has. And it really is just helping you to kind of answer soccer questions in a way that traditional soccer data is really not very good at doing. Like we've had kind of the same stats in soccer for a very long time. And like knowing how many corner kicks a team took in a game doesn't tell you anything about how the game went or how they play it, right? And to like measure stuff that's really interesting in soccer, you actually have to have pretty sophisticated data, you have to have like machine learning models built on every touch of the ball. And then you can, you know, simplify it down. And so that's what we're doing. It's like, we're, we're building a live score app that anybody can use. And you know, hopefully, everybody will want to use, ah because it uses those kind of more advanced tools to answer real questions.
00:04:24
Speaker
So when you get into like the guts, what is the is this built on the same stuff that
Data Sources and Challenges in Soccer Analytics
00:04:28
Speaker
Opto is using? Or is it using like, ah like a different, ah Yes, so we use a different event data providers than Opta, but the same sort of thing. So it's it's data providers that clubs use you know when they're scouting players, but provided live. So you know you can check it in-game and we'll be updating stats just like... ah just like other apps do. And so it's built on data on every touch of the ball, sometimes called event data, sometimes called play by play data. It doesn't have data on, you know, all 22 players running around what's called tracking data. um
00:05:03
Speaker
That stuff is, it exists, but is way too expensive to run on this kind of app. So Yeah, we're we're kind of the middle ground, right? We're not doing the space age stuff that clubs can afford to do when they're scouting because we have to do it live in a consumer app.
00:05:15
Speaker
But we're also not just like buying, you know, basic stats to tell you this player completed seven of 10 passes because that doesn't really help. Right. Yeah. So is there anything when you started digging into this, you know, you've obviously been covering soccer for a long time and writing about it on a deep, pretty deep level for a long time. Was there anything that you sort of discovered or priors that you had that maybe got challenged by what the what your own app was was telling you?
00:05:43
Speaker
Oh, man, all the time. and And we're still, you know, we're just now starting to introduce some of these models that we've been working on to the public. And we're still like kind of getting to really play around with them ourselves for the first time. And, you know, when the app ah goes live next month, when we start testing with users, like we're going to be finding out new stuff all the time. But ah yeah. So like, like when I wrote about soccer ah for the athletic for years and, you know, for other places like five 38 and the guardian,
00:06:12
Speaker
I very frequently had to like do all the data work myself, ah which was a lot in part because I'm not a data scientist, right? i'm i'm not I'm not even like, i've I've never taken a stats class in my life. You know, i was I was a guy who like went to like liberal arts schools and like got a law degree and and literally just learned how to code and how to do soccer data stuff. ah because I was curious about how soccer worked. and you know I got involved with the American Soccer Analysis folks and they taught me a lot. you know They've got real PhDs over there.
00:06:43
Speaker
My co-founder Footy is Mike Mbergio, who's a guy who worked at ASA. and He built like the the Davies model, which was really successful for ah player recruitment and like clubs started contacting him. He's been consulting and like building models for clubs that do this kind of stuff.
00:06:58
Speaker
um And so like some of these models that we have in footy are similar to things that you've already seen, like an American soccer analysis. They have this, you know, goals added possession value model that some of your listeners have probably heard of. And when we rolled that out, say six years ago, like that changed a lot of how I think about soccer, ah thinking about the game in terms of like goal probabilities at every moment.
00:07:23
Speaker
already changed a lot of how I think about soccer. And so that's part of what we're doing at footy. And that kind of revolution and how I see the game is is just sort of ongoing for me. But what we're doing now is a lot of stylistic models that I haven't had access to before. And these are things that like, I never could have built this, you know, to write one article about it. It was it was like we needed, you know, I needed ah a real serious data scientist who's worked with clubs and we needed a lot of time and like money and and to like build these things out. And so now, I can measure things that I had never imagined being able to measure, like how teams play in specific phases of the game, like how, you know, two players who play the same position have different roles or within those roles, you know, how there are completely different stylistic tendencies. it's It's really cool stuff, I think. And I'm still like kind of getting my head around it.
Seattle Sounders' Playing Style
00:08:13
Speaker
So, you know, One of the, we've had a couple, like I said, we've had a couple articles that have dug into some of the the data on here, specifically looking at the Sounders. And I am curious what you feel like you've, what footy is telling us about how the Sounders play.
00:08:29
Speaker
And, you know, because I think one of the things that's interesting to me about the Sounders is that, you know Brian Schmetzer has now been the coach for this is his 10th season, I believe. And you know especially early on, one of the the criticisms that was sometimes lobbed at them was, I don't really know what it is they're doing. like they are playing what they They're winning games, and it feels kind of sustainable, but...
00:08:53
Speaker
they didn't have like a style, but what your information has shown us, I think is that there is a style there. It just maybe doesn't fit into what we, you know, like the broad brushes that oftentimes teams get painted with.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess I will say, like, at a high level, what the Sounders are doing is kind of the new MLS meta, which is, like, they're fairly possession-y, right? um They press a little bit, but not too much. Like, they're not an extreme stylistic team, but they're... they're playing good kind of fundamental soccer in a like standard formation. And so we have four primary team styles that we classify teams as, as playing during a match. And, you know, you could be like a launch and squish team, right. Who's, who's playing really ah direct in possession and then like pressing high. And that's like kind of the Philadelphia union, right. You could be a press and possess for classic, like Gordiola, like, you know, suffocate the game and the opponents end like the crew did that. Uh, the Sounders were squarely in what we call control and regroup, right? They're controlling the ball in possession, but when they lose it, like they'll often fall back and, you know, not, not be like all out and sort of balls to the wall pressing. um
00:10:05
Speaker
And that control and regroup ah quadrant that the Sounders are in is like most MLS teams have kind of migrated there in recent years. And so a lot of what they're doing is like,
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, under Schmetzer, they've kind of always played this way. there have been subtle variations that we can see in the the historical data, but like, really, it's been a story of the league kind of moving towards the Sounders.
00:10:26
Speaker
Now that said, like, even in this, like, style that the whole league is playing, like, we can see a lot of interesting stuff. And and I am happy to dig into that with you. But yeah, or our day, Steve. Yeah.
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. What is it that you feel like the, like if you're going to try to explain to someone, how is it that the Sounders are, you know, able to succeed on a level of, consider not necessarily their heights. I think we understand their heights are oftentimes not,
00:10:56
Speaker
quite as high as, you know, they they've only won one supporter shield. It goes all the way, know, you got to go back before Schmetzer to find that one. They've never even won the Western conference in the regular season. ah I think they've only won at one other time. And that was in the COVID season.
00:11:10
Speaker
And so it's like, they are oftentimes competitive, but they're not always the best. And i don't know, do you see anything in there in the data that sort of helps explain that? So I guess on a sort of mid-tier stylistic level, like it's it's true that they are not extreme outliers on a lot of these metrics that we look at. like they're a little bit more patient than most teams when they're progressing the ball. They're like fairly wide in the attack. I think Jake Burgess wrote about this for you guys.
00:11:40
Speaker
ah You know, that's a pretty consistent characteristic of Schmetzer's teams is that, you know, they'll attack from out wide and they'll use those cutback zones that a lot of people have written about over the years, you know, to try to create high value chances.
00:11:52
Speaker
Um, The Man City zone is what a lot of people... Man City zone, yeah. This was back when Man City used that zone. They don't anymore, but Sounders are still doing it, which is good. um But, like, yeah. I mean, the way that they use their possession, I think, is pretty interesting to me. ah They were, I think, seventh in the league for possession last year. You know, like, fairly fairly high. Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker
but they were not a team that spent a lot of time in the buildup. So like ah San Diego, for example, I wrote an article for the guardian last year using what we call phase of play data. And that means we've tagged every single action on the pitch with like what's going on contextually around it. Like what's the tactical situation, you know, in this, in this segment of the game.
00:12:35
Speaker
So like the buildup is when you, you know, you're trying to play from your own third on your goal, you know, trying to get it up towards the halfway line. And there are a lot of like, Our data model is very sophisticated and like there are a lot of triggers that can move you from one phase to another. It's not just about where the ball is, but but basically that's it, right? San Diego would play a ton of passes in the buildup. They would play really deep, like short passes, and they would break really fast, right? The Sounders are kind of the opposite of that.
00:12:58
Speaker
They did not spend very much time at all in the buildup. And they spent a ton of time circulating patiently in what we call progression, which is, you know, you're kind of in midfield. You're not quite close enough to put the wall in the box yet, but you're being very patient trying to break the opponent down.
00:13:12
Speaker
And I think part of that is that the Sounders also weren't very good in the buildup. So they didn't spend a lot of time on it, but like they were kind playing to their strengths. ah Jackson Reagan was, was really good. One of our top rated center backs, but, But Yamar was not very good. He would get caught on the ball a lot. And that meant that their their win rate of those buildup phases was not good. Right. They they weren't always progressing in well. But once they got to progression, like the numbers are insane. They're really good at like taking the ball from midfield, creating chances. And that was one thing that they did extremely well in a way that like that balance was different than I think any other team in the league.
00:13:53
Speaker
Sounder at Heart has been around in one form or another since 2009. In 2026, though, we make a pretty significant evolution when we go analog. Yes, that's right. In the year of our Lord, 2026, we are publishing a real life magazine. We're calling this thing 4, as in Sounder at Heart 4.0. But we're stylizing it as IV because we absolutely love Roman numeral. And if you want to refer to it as IV, that's cool too. The first issue has a comic book style cover that was hand drawn by local artist Kevin Newber. Features by Tim Foss, Susie Rance, and Charlie Bohm. A statistical deep dive by Kat Bush. A Q&A with b Brian Schmetzer. A column by G. Willow Wilson. And photographs by Noah Reif, Max Aquino, Mike Russell, and Jane Gershowitz. I could not possibly be more proud of the work everyone put into making this, and I think you're going absolutely love it. If
Sounder at Heart's Magazine Launch for 2026
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Speaker
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00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, one of the other things that I thought ah was illustrated in Jake's story, for for instance, was sort of sort of this final third passing where there was, you know, they were, I believe, one of the top teams in terms of completing passes in the in the final third. And Albert Rusnak really stands out in in that area for the Sounders. And it's he's a funny player because i think a lot of fans see him and they sort of, they they don't look at the, they don't see the consistency. They see the peaks, right? And this is a player who has, like the Sounders, consistently performed over the
00:16:30
Speaker
ah long I think he's now the longest tenured designated player in MLS history. And almost every season, he's right around 10 goals, 10 assists. One way or the other, he gets his he gets his numbers. But it's never he's never putting up MVP-type numbers. and But I feel like he sort of is an interesting player in this, at least you know in this, in that he's just consistently doing a lot of stuff that's dangerous.
00:16:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I like that you mentioned a couple numbers that are kind of familiar and contrast in some ways with how footy measures
Player Evaluation Beyond Traditional Stats
00:17:04
Speaker
players and teams. So like you were talking about the Sounders have really high pass completion rates in the final third, right? I think that goes back to that progression that we' we're talking about. Like if you have pass completion high completion rates in the final third, that means you're passing backwards a lot, right? You're circulating, you're kind of being patient. You're not all in the box directly, right?
00:17:21
Speaker
And ah very frequently, like, because past completion rates have kind of been like one of the few stats that we've had access to, we focused on that and we thought like, oh, high pass completion rates are better or whatever. Like that's not always true. It can be like stylistically it can be, but it is really more of a measure of style.
00:17:39
Speaker
And so what we do is, is something called possession value, which again is similar to the goals added. It's a measure of goal probabilities, all like every single touch. And so what we would ask is not like, okay, if, if Rusnak has the ball in the final third, not does he complete the next pass, but does the next pass help his team to get into a better goals?
00:18:00
Speaker
Right. So, you know, whether that's a safe, complete pass backwards or, you know, a really aggressive, like dribble into the box or something like those goal probabilities are how we evaluate players. And so, yeah, like Rusnak shows up really well in that. ah Although we're dealing with something interesting right now where ah the way that our player ratings work, it's...
00:18:24
Speaker
sometimes difficult to compare like an attacking midfielder and like a second striker, a guy who might play in a similar area. And you have to have different baselines for the goal probability. So we we're still like, we're messing around with these models, even as we speak, even as we like get ready to roll this thing out for users.
00:18:41
Speaker
um And as we re-baseline these guys, you know, I think Rusnak is one of the top five attacking meds in the league, which Oh, most people would probably agree with like, he's z's a really good player, but we're not measuring that on the basis of goals and assists because this is going to anything, right? It can be like a little like two yard pass to somebody who then dribbles through the whole opponent.
00:19:00
Speaker
Or like in in the first game of the season, Jesus Ferreira, it was a secondary ah assist, but he gets a secondary assist for that pass that Rothrock has to save from going out of bounds just because it's like ends up being, I guess it it pushed the Sounders into the attacking third. or i don't really exactly know the reasoning for it, but that was kind of a funny assist where it was like,
00:19:20
Speaker
basically a horrible pass but it worked out okay uh and that's you know that's that's oftentimes how what is this like i don't know it's this or or funny like that but we don't need to delve into that uh would you say that aside from i don't and i this is a genuine question i don't know if the the answer to ah which i guess is is sometimes a bad strategy but i'll ask it anyway as as a lawyer i'm sure you can appreciate that but uh are you getting into defining player roles as well as sort of, or player styles as ah as opposed to just team styles?
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. So we're going to drop a whole series on this next week. Yeah. sweat sir Thanks for setting me up for that. So, so So this series is going to talk about a bunch of the player models that we have. and then the first thing is roles as distinct from positions, right? So a lot of times a lot of times where you line up on the you know lineup card isn't where you actually wind up playing. And so if you're using those positions on the on the lineup sheet as sort of your baseline for judging a player, you might wind up comparing them to totally the wrong group of players, right? So the first thing we do is we create database roles to figure out where the player was really playing. Then within those roles, we have what we call player styles.
00:20:34
Speaker
And so that is where we get into like, you know, OK, so you're in the sort of defensive midfield group. Right. But are you, you know, sort of a regista who's pinging these long passes, right? A deep line playmaker type or are you like a destroyer, right? A totally different type of player. And so we can use a lot of kind of sophisticated modeling to tell you not just where does the player play, but what type of player are they? Right. And we've got a bunch of these different player styles.
00:20:58
Speaker
Then we've got player tendencies, which is distinct from styles, but it's telling you ah sort of when they are in certain situations, how do they like to play? Like where do they like to be more aggressive or where do they like to drop outside the block versus trying to receive inside the lines? Or where where do they like to dribble on the ball rather than you know trying to pass? like That kind of tendency helps us to get an even deeper layer of understanding of how the player plays.
00:21:23
Speaker
Finally, on top of all that, we can layer in stuff like the goal probabilities that we talked about in the possession value model and also something called wrap them, which basketball fans probably know, which is like kind of when you're on the pitch versus when you're off, how well is your team playing?
00:21:37
Speaker
That's a really difficult thing to do in soccer. You need a lot of minutes because players don't come out on and and off the pitch as much as in basketball. And you need pretty sophisticated modeling techniques, but it can give us some signal on all the like intangible stuff. stuff that players do all the off ball stuff that they're doing that you can't measure directly with the data.
00:21:54
Speaker
All of that goes into our player rating. And so in the end, we get a number that looks just like any other live score apps, like, you know, in one to 100 rating for the player, but it's so much sophisticated and it's telling you so much more about their performance.
00:22:07
Speaker
I know. And I know we, especially Americans loved that definitive number that tells us how good a player is. How close are we to actually, how close are you to rolling that out?
00:22:18
Speaker
So you're going to see some player ratings next week from us at Foodie. Those are going to be... Right now, we're just releasing 2025 And about... and about gosh, a little over a month now, we're going to start testing with users, maybe even less than a month, depending on how excited we get to ah start giving some early invites. and And so then those folks will have access to live data from 2026, and we'll you know get that widespread as fast as we can.
00:22:45
Speaker
ah But yeah, by next week, you'll be able to see all this like player role data that I'm talking about, the player tendencies, the player ratings up to the end of last season. And you can see you know how some of this stuff evolved over time.
00:22:58
Speaker
And so are you like, what do you ultimately, what is the like the end game for all this? Is this the, is, is there like I don't know what's like, how do you want to, what do you, what do you foresee footy being and in a couple of years when it's sort of like matured?
Enhancing Soccer Enjoyment with Data
00:23:14
Speaker
So the end game for me is honestly just to like help people enjoy soccer more. Like like that pet it it sounds stupid. Like it's not, it's not a very like world conquering, you know, CEO founder or slogan, but like genuinely just want I can appreciate it. Like our, our current slogan at footy that we decided on recently is see the whole game, right? The whole old like Busquets thing. Like you watch Busquets, you see the whole love game. Like,
00:23:40
Speaker
that's what our data is supposed to help you do. And, you know, we want to build a really good live score app. And then we want to go even deeper than that. and we want to give like, you know, fans who want, you know, hardcore stuff for whatever reason, a lot of people are just sickos, you know, we want to give you deeper data on the things that you like.
00:23:57
Speaker
We want to build fantasy games around it. Right. Eventually we may have a club facing product as well, because a lot of the models that we're building, like one, one problem, sorry, my dog's barking. Yeah.
00:24:09
Speaker
one One problem in soccer, like real life soccer clubs, is that every soccer club spends a ton of time and money kind of building the same models and the same software that we're building right now.
00:24:21
Speaker
And like soccer teams shouldn't really be software companies. Like that's kind of inefficient, right? Yeah. They all think that they're going to get this unique edge over other clubs. And really, it's more about how you use the data. And so we think that if we have these baseline models, like we can you know put that stuff out for clubs and hopefully free up club data people to work on more advanced stuff.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah. ah I know that is one of the things I always wonder about with this data. And I think that the Sounders at least seem to be doing a good job of illustrating that you know, you can have all this data and the center seemed like they under, like they appreciate the data and they, they, you know, they, they put a lot of time and energy into it, but they, there's also this sort of like element of recruitment that they, I think maybe they have gotten better than a lot of other teams, which is, it's not just what the the numbers are telling you a player is doing. It's not even just what your eyes are telling you that the player is doing. It's like, how does that player fit into the team?
00:25:18
Speaker
the whole piece, like how does that piece fit into the larger puzzle? And that does seem to be one area where, you know, the data probably is never going to be able to tell us. And I guess that's a good thing, right? Like we want a human element to ultimately just like the the data should refine stuff and it should inform us and help us understand things. But ultimately, I think we all want humans to be, you know,
00:25:41
Speaker
making the decisions to the detect like, we don't want AI to build our teams, I guess is what I'm saying. I guess that's on who you ask. Yeah, I guess it does. It does. It does. So fans as fans, here's what I'll say. Like,
00:25:55
Speaker
Data, even at really good soccer teams, is almost never the last word. like it's it's right There are only a ah handful of like weirdo clubs that are trying to do all of their recruitment with data.
00:26:07
Speaker
And some do, and some actually do it successfully. But to do that, you need really sophisticated models, not just for the types of stylistic stuff that I was talking to you about, although that is important if you're going to assess you know not just is this player good, but are they the right fit for this squad, right?
00:26:21
Speaker
So the right tactical fit, you need a lot of stylistic stuff, you might need some, you know, measures of chemistry, right, you might need kind of projecting like depth charts, see there's, there's a lot that you can do with data to build a good team. But at the end of the day, like, what it's really good for is helping you to scout all of these players that you can't watch on video, right?
Balancing Data with Human Judgment
00:26:40
Speaker
Like 10,000 players in the world could be good MLS players, and nobody's gonna watch all those guys, right? You have to find who are the people who you actually want to go like, you know, grind some tape on. And then after you grind the tape, like, and this is where I think the human element really comes in.
00:26:53
Speaker
ah Teams, you know, we'll send live scouts and frequently the live scouts job is not so much to like tell you the same stuff that you can see on video, but to go talk to coaches, talk to teammates, you know, maybe even talk to like people in the stands and like watch the players like body language and like watch how they interact with people. You're trying to get a sense of like, is this a good thing?
00:27:10
Speaker
personal fit for our team, right? You you want to get read on the person. And I think that's where the human element is always going to exist in soccer because teams are teams of people, not just data points. Right. Now, one of the the recent anecdotes that I got from a a guy who does scouting for the Sounders was he was talking about going to Spain to watch the third division Not because they were actively recruiting out of the third division of Spain, but they needed to have, they wanted that sort of visual data to tell them like, are this, what's the level that these, that these players are actually at. And if we're getting data from, if someone's sending us tape or they're sending us data points or whatever, and we're looking on a spreadsheet, even on film, what is this player doing? And it's like, wow, he's dominating these guys. But if you don't have any context for who he's doing it against, know,
00:28:01
Speaker
it it doesn't It doesn't ring the same. And I just thought that was kind of an interesting piece that it was like understanding the full context of of of everything is is still important.
00:28:12
Speaker
I mean, if I was getting paid to hang out in Spain, I'd say the same thing. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I got to be on the beach, you know, in Barcelona. Yeah. No, like I think that there is something to that, although a lot of league adjustment stuff is things that you do with data and like it's it's hard, but it is like kind of one of the fundamental things that that clubs try to do.
00:28:33
Speaker
There's also like a lot of like atmosphere stuff though, right? Like I've talked to South American scouts who are like, Yeah, you're never going to see in the data or on Wisecout that this game was played in La Paz at like 8,000 feet, right? i said Right.
00:28:45
Speaker
What that does to you physically like is is very dramatic. And, you know, yeah, sure. Fans, atmosphere, all these things. Like, ah did did they fly in late last night and like get no sleep and then play this game? Like, these are these are things that are not easy to suss out from Wisecout. Yeah.
00:29:02
Speaker
Although i'm I'm guessing the data would probably tell you that getting some sleep before the game, like you'll probably be able to find enough examples of both that you can get some data on that too, right? You know what? If that data set exists, we haven't found it yet. Yeah.
00:29:17
Speaker
there's There's probably yeah some sleep data for like whole leagues out there. That would be, that's the next, sta I guess that's the next, that's the next ah um variable to plug into the system. But John, theta yeah.
00:29:30
Speaker
Well, John, where can people like, tell where can people read you? Where where can they go check this out? What's the, like, what's the timeline for everything? Like ah set set up our readers for our listeners for ah using this in their real lives.
Engaging with Footy: Waitlist and Resources
00:29:45
Speaker
Cool. So the first place that you probably want to go is footy.live, F-U-T-I u t i l i v That's our website. You can you know read a little bit more about the app and you can also join the waitlist. So if this is something that you want to use when the app is something you can actually download on your phone, like go do that, go join the waitlist. But if you want to hear more about like the nuts and bolts behind it and understand some of these models that we've been talking about, go to our sub stack.
00:30:11
Speaker
You can just Google footy sub stack, or you can go to footy app.substack.com. So that's where we were going to publish these explainers that I'm talking about ah regarding all the player style stuff that'll be coming out next week.
00:30:22
Speaker
And then of course you can follow us on all the social media sites. I am currently cutting some ah short form video for the first time in my life, which I hate, but you know, a lot of people like that's, that's how people engage with things these days. So like, yeah, we're, we're going to do some video explainers. We're going to be, you know, posting on blue sky and,
00:30:39
Speaker
whatever. We've got a great discord channel as well. If you want to come hop in and talk with a soccer analytics nerds, you can join us over there. And I got to tell you, it warms the, the cackles of my heart that among the social media channels that you guys are not advertising of being on, it doesn't, I don't see Twitter on here.
00:30:57
Speaker
yeah, I blew up my 50,000 follower Twitter account and never looked back and yeah don't miss it at all. Blue sky's great. It's got a good, I'm It is funny not to get too far afield, but it was very funny because someone did this data, this map of ah blue sky users and sort of like tried to define like what circles people were in. And there is American soccer circle And then there's a Sounders circle, which was separate.
00:31:24
Speaker
and And at first people were like, oh, Sounders fans are so weird. They have their own separate thing. And I said, actually, I think what's going on here is that there's enough Sounders people. that It's the only American team with enough people on Blue Sky where we could have our own. And I know, I just love it. I love it. I love like i love that i can I can exist in a Sounders ah echo chamber. It's great.
00:31:48
Speaker
But John, thank you so much for for doing this. where Where can they follow you on on Blue Sky as well? ah So I'm at johnspacemuller.com is my my Blue Sky handle, I think. But yeah, perfect come come check out Footy.
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, ah good talking to you, John. I'm now waiting with bated breath to get be able to get access to this app. I actually learned, I think I learned in this interview that it was footy.live that I'd been missing and not because I'd just been going to your sub stack looking for stuff. but Yeah, for a long time, we were only pulling people to the sub stack, but now we've got a live wait list. So we're telling people to sign up.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah, good stuff. All right. Well, with that, we're going to get out of here. I'm Jeremiah Shan. This is No Study Yet, just part of the Sounder Heart Podcast Network, and we will catch you next time.
00:33:08
Speaker
Let's go, and Sounders.