Soccer
EPV vs xG: The Quiet Revolution Coming to World Cup Coverage
Expected Goals (xG) entered mainstream soccer coverage about a decade ago and changed how serious analysts read matches. Expected Possession…
SportsHighLight · Author
D. Reyes
D. Reyes is the SportsHighLight soccer correspondent. They cover club football across Europe, the Americas, and the international windows, with a working appetite for xG, expected threat (xT), packing, PPDA, and tactical reads. Favors pass network maps and pressing structure over transfer-rumor churn.
Methods
The Schedule Tax: Why Every Hot Streak Owes the Calendar Money
A streak can be a revelation. It can also be four tired opponents, two backup centers, and a calendar with a sense of humor.
Methods
What Makes a Sports Metric Useful, Not Just Popular
In 2007, John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating sat at the top of nearly every NBA conversation that pretended to be…
Methods
Survivorship Bias: Why Every Champion Looks Inevitable When You Already Know Who Won
Survivorship bias, how it warps every sports retrospective, where it shows up in the data, and how to write around it without falling into...
Newsroom
How a Single Game Becomes a Trend: The Mechanics of Sports Narrative Building
How a single game becomes a trend, how the trend hardens into a narrative, how the narrative survives even after the underlying performance falls...
Newsroom
How to Write a Game-Analysis Article That Survives Six Months
A seven-step editorial workflow for turning a single game into a piece of writing that holds up: pick a real question, pull three layers...
Methods
Reading Team Trends: The Second Sample Rule
A working guide to reading team trends without falling for the streak. Sample size, schedule strength, injury fog, rotation experiments, regression to the mean...
Newsroom
The Athletic vs Twitter: How Sports Coverage Fragmented Across Formats
I spent most of a Tuesday in March in three different sports-media tabs. One was a long-form analytics piece at…
Newsroom
The Anatomy of a Sports Twitter Take Cycle: Six Hours, Six Stages
The anatomy of a sports Twitter take cycle — its six identifiable stages, the timing of each, the incentives driving the engine, and how...
Methods
Bayesian Updating in Sports: How to Change Your Mind Like a Pro
Bayesian updating in sports — what the method actually is, how it applies to player evaluation, team analysis, and award voting, and how to...