If You Want To Waste Some Time…

By: Inara | October 8th, 2007

Some of you may have noticed that Lyon’s official website has been steadily improving in terms of appearance and information. Nowadays, the English portion of the site is updated almost every day, and there is always information available on OL Ladies and the CFAs.

The most recent innovation is the interactive Statistics Center which collects, organizes, and posts all relevant (and irrelevant) match data for number crunching fans to enjoy. Props to Lyon for making football a little bit more like baseball!

Olympique Lyonnais for Dummies

The stat center will tell you anything could possibly ever want to know about both teams in Lyon’s most recent match. You can find out how many interceptions and tackles each player made, how many shots they took with what foot, and who each player prefers to send passes to. In fact, you could probably even find out what color underwear the players had on underneath their shorts.

The reason this is so cool is because the numbers give you a clearer idea of what’s happening on the pitch.

Speaking for myself, when I watch a game, I don’t notice most details, so unless a player is scoring or fouling, chances are I have no idea how he’s performing in a match. But the numbers tell me exactly how a player spends 90 minutes of his time.

Here’s something I found interesting: against Bordeaux, 44% of Lyon’s attacks went down the left hand side, 31% through the center, and only 25% on the right (which clearly tells us that Sidney Govou needs to stop his cat fight with Juninho and start working that right corridor).

I also learned that Anderson had the most interceptions while Kim Kallstrom received the most number of passes. Besides Remy Vercoutre, the next OL player with the most possession was Fabio Grosso. Oh, and despite Lyon dominating the match, Bordeaux had 56% of the total possession.

Unfortunately, the data is only from the most recent match, so you can’t access an archived match, which makes sense, given the sheer volume of data Lyon have available.

Anyway, so this is how I spent my time as I waited for my DNA gel to finish running this morning. My boss probably thought all the arrows and numbers had something to do with my research project. Oh well, what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.