Introducing @CzechFooty’s 2023/24 Fortuna:Liga Team Preview Series
After a bit of a hot-needle summer 2021, I declared last preview series the “showtime” — and you guys did indeed show up to provide us with an unprecedented positive feedback. That made this run a particular challenge, as I’m always wary of resting on the laurels yet the tight league schedule — combined with my actual work life and intense readying to swap Czech pastures for Zambian ones — has done me no favours. It’s getting hard to maintain a certain standard; or to push it further each year as much as I’d like to. Let’s hope you won’t feel let down by the end of what could prove to be a farewell lap of this bunch/format (because, well, life).
The roadmap
There’s one less week to work with this summer, which is more significant than it may sound at first. While Plzeň’s 2021/22 season started earlier than the upcoming one (on 19 July), it also kicked off at least 11 days ahead of 13/16s of the league, giving me a chance to spread all articles out neatly. This time, I don’t enjoy such a luxury, but a delayed start of all Czech European campaigns at least means I can save the most popular clubs for last and shed the early-summer spotlight — when y’all still have loads of energy — on some of the clubs on the periphery that would typically go last. At the same time, to avoid a far-too-premature deadline for all off-season changes (while at the same time avoiding a return to the exhausting 3 articles per day), I’ll have to schedule a pair of previews on what is already the first 2023/24 FORTUNA:LIGA matchday (with both playing on Sunday, though). Anyway, here’s the 2023 running order (subject to slight change):
Friday 14 July: FK Teplice
Friday 14 July: Bohemians Praha 1905
Saturday 15 July: SK Sigma Olomouc
Saturday 15 July: FC Zlín
Sunday 16 July: FC Baník Ostrava
Sunday 16 July: MFK Karviná
Monday 17 July: FK Pardubice
Monday 17 July: FC Hradec Králové
Tuesday 18 July: FC Slovan Liberec
Tuesday 18 July: FK Jablonec
Wednesday 19 July: 1. FC Slovácko
Wednesday 19 July: FC Viktoria Plzeň
Thursday 20 July: SK Slavia Praha
Friday 21 July: AC Sparta Praha
Saturday 22 July: SK Dynamo Č. Budějovice
Saturday 22 July: FK Mladá Boleslav
What’s new in stock
Not much frankly. Plenty of tweaking last summer led to a satisfactory result — format I’m still happy with 12 months later. Adam still delivers the graphics, Jakub is still on board with his unique prediction model, and I’m still doing all the writing (soz) with the much appreciated help from across all fandoms. Metrics feeding into all my positional models have changed a bit (explained here), as did my approach to splitting game sample between multiple roles (very conservative this time; too time-consuming), but it was no earthquake like last year. All 2022 preview sections stay intact, though some may now be informed by one new arrival I’m particularly glad for…
Statsbomb data sprinkled all around: Advanced data produced by the company named Statsbomb, proud partner of the title-winning Sparta Praha, are widely appreciated as one of the most credible football data sources around, and so it’s only my pleasure to welcome Slovak native and Statsbomb’s marketing consultant Marek Kabát aboard our ever-expanding train of data enthusiasts. Marek has already done some work with Sparťanské noviny, along with a great podcast appearance on the subject of Slovak Fortuna Liga 2022/23 season, and he’ll be running a Twitter thread on all 15 surviving FORTUNA:LIGA participants ahead of the 2023/24 season, too. The said thread will be specifically designed to accompany our team previews series, providing kind of an outsourced graphic representation of my random Statsbomb data references throughout the articles (especially in the What went right/wrong sections). The traditional Most Valuable Player section will now also feature a mention of the Statsbomb’s MVP per the so-called On-Ball Value (OBV), an innovative metric capturing just about everything happening inbetween shots.
What stays the same
My credentials: They do me no favours, all told. I stopped kicking the ball regularly when I was about 13. I stopped doing any sport regularly when I was 18, as I did my knee while playing floorball at a reasonably high level and never returned due to the timing (I was just starting uni in a different city). I’ve only ever dipped into coaching — and it barely counts, as it was at youth floorball level. I’ve written about football pretty much nonstop since 2011, both in Czech and English, yet I’d never consider myself a “journalist” or even well-connected within the football industry. Some footballers do follow me — mostly the young ones who speak decent English — but I don’t think it’s over a dozen. I don’t personally know any agents or top flight coaches and while I’m technically part of a scouting network, I have yet to specifically recommend anyone to any club. I can’t do shit in Python or any other programming language, and don’t start about the graphics. I consider myself to be more of an influencer — an ugly word these days — than expert.
My day job is, in fact, miles away from the football industry and I’m quite happy with that. I spend insane hours on analyzing this bloody sport as it is.
What I can offer then, I suppose, are the resources (old, affordable Wyscout subscription), advanced Google spreadsheet skills (fancy functions and all) to help me extract intriguing stuff from raw, largely unintereresting data, and some willingness to put the aforementioned to use on a weekly basis.
It’s still true, after all, that I watched each of 276 FORTUNA:LIGA games last season, many of them twice, and did even more detailed tracking of game events than the year before. To give you a rough idea, I have this sort of data on both offensive and defensive side of the game for every game of each team. For the first time this season, I specifically tracked chances generated off of forced turnovers and credited creators for chances left unfinished not through their own doing. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I can confidently say there’s not a more comprehensive (semi)public dataset on FORTUNA:LIGA out there, even if my tracking is inherently subjective (but then so is Wyscout tagging, for example, as their definition of xG literally includes “tagger’s assessment of the danger of the shot” as one of the variables) and thus not flawless. In fact, on the subject of Wyscout and their raw data: I bugged them so frequently they stopped reviewing my tagging requests towards the end of the season. That should be a bit concerning for any user of their database, as any goal-line clearance will now continue to be tagged as a shot on target (hence a goalkeeper’s save!), not to mention the odd shot wrongly showing up despite getting flagged for offside etc.
My mission: I started covering Czech football in summer 2019 to provide an alternative view of it. I was — and still am — missing a chunk of nuance as part of its coverage; something I had ambitiously set about to fix. That’s not to say there are no journalists capable of bringing necessary detail to their reporting, it’s just the broken industry mostly not allowing them to do so; with the immensely insightful podcast iSkaut standing tall as an exception.
There’s always someone to play your views off of, but strangely enough, I find that even those with a voice can’t quite find it in their actual job of a journalist. Articles need to be short to have readers, so they require shortcuts like “this guy has numbers” (ie. goals and assists), “this guy is quick/slow” etc. which ultimately does more harm than good in my eyes.
Longform read on Czech football is notoriously hard to come by — and that’s where I enter… to arguably over-compensate. I can’t personally bring nuance to everything there is to cover, but I’ve luckily been blessed with many capable helpers along the way. Jakub Lebloch, David Rozlivek, Pepa Javůrek or Vojtěch Mrklas are always there to teach me a thing or two about tactics, Jakub Dobiáš is always there to confront me with a second opinion on analytics derived from the superior 11Hacks database, and I have an entire army of fans who get to see the players in person regularly and have their guaranteed spot as part of my team previews. Most data analysts would write fans off for their inherent bias; I rather see advantage in them.
The sample size warning: It should be universally recognized by now that sample size matters and you should never EVER compare a 30-start mainstay with a super-sub worth of a mere 6,5 starts once you put everything together. Yet apparently, this point needs to be driven home over and over fucking again, so here you go. Even the difference between 10 and 20 appearances is notable, and I’ll make sure to point out whenever a comparison I personally make is far from perfect. You’d be surprised how much one start against a lowly bottom-feeder can influence your 10-game dataset as opposed to a 30-game one (where it gets easily buried).
The context caveat: It also matters who you play for, of course. It’s clear that starting in goal for Slavia, for instance, is a very different job to just about any other goalkeeping gig in the Czech top flight. While Slavia coaches may value sweeping and distributing qualities above much else, a less dominant side will mostly lean on the traditional shot-stopping skills of their custodian. This is why our comparison template looked much different last year — splitting one dataset into 3-4 dimensions of filling one player role to showcase the oft-missing nuance I mention above. A player might have a low overall percentile (considering all 18-19 metrics), but still be an elite contributor in one area of his game that can be harnessed.
So when you’re reading the previews themselves, please don’t linger too much on the overall percentiles. They are, in a way, one of the shortcuts I was complaining about earlier. The individual layers are where true merit lies. Those who come on top should, in theory, have less holes in their game or be more effective in all phases of the game than anyone else on their position (which does actually pass my eye test more often than not, to be fair). But even when your favourite player doesn’t sit in the comfortable 90+ percentile (meaning he’s done “better” than 90% comparable players), it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s useless. It quite possibly only means he’s not a two-way winger or a very constructive holding midfielder, but that doesn’t take away anything from the fact they might still be bloody dangerous/defensively sound options in one way or another.
Finally, one universal caution: don’t believe anything you see straight away and never take any number at its face value. That’s not how any stats, data of any kind works, and my model — however meticulously construed (and trust me, I’ve gone back and forth on all metrics) — won’t be any different.
Not now, not ever.
If you count yourself among the fans of my, Adam’s or Jakub’s work, please do consider supporting us all together by donating a small amount of money at BuyMeACoffee page. It would be too kind from you and much appreciated by us!
