Nathan Braun – Learn To Code With Soccer

Python. Pandas. Web Scraping. Databases. SQL. Machine Learning. APIs. All applied to Soccer Data

Soccer is a great gateway to coding

Learning to code isn’t hard, you just need to stick with it a bit. That’s why the most important thing is starting with a project you’re excited about.

This book will take you from playing around with stats in Excel to scraping websites, building databases and running your own machine learning models.

Learn How to Do Your Own Soccer Analysis in Python

You’ll learn — step by step and applied to soccer — how to program your own analysis.

Do I need any coding experience?

• No! Many people have gone through it with zero coding experience and done just fine.
• That said, it does move fast and build on itself, so if you’re new you might just have to take it slower and make sure you understand each section before continuing.
• It includes end-of-chapter problems and exercises that you can use to do that, so it’s not hard.

Do I need any special software?

We’ll learn Python, which is a free, open-source program. Detailed installation instructions are included.

The book includes some optional spaced repetition flashcards to help you remember what you’ve learned. The official iPhone app to use these costs $25 (it’s free on Android). It’s worth it IMO, but I describe workarounds if you don’t want to pay this.

What You’ll Learn In Learn To Code With Soccer?

• Python — This flexible language is the foundation of everything from data munging to web scraping to machine learning. You’ll also learn about its key data library Pandas, the modeling and machine learning libraries statsmodels and scikit-learn, and how to do data visualizations with seaborn.
• Web Scraping and APIs — Next time you run across a site with data you’d like to analyze you’ll know how to grab data via its public API if it’s available, or build a web scraper to get it yourself if it’s not.
• Machine Learning and Statistics — You’ll learn the difference between a regression and a random forest, and will know when and how to build both.
• Databases and SQL — Build your own database — whether it’s for player statistics, to keep track of opponent tenancies, etc — and use SQL to get data in and out of it.
• All in the context of soccer and designed so you can learn how to apply them to your own questions and do your own analysis.

About the author

Hi! My name is Nate and I’m a self-taught programmer and data scientist based in Milwaukee, WI.

A few years ago, I didn’t know anything about Python, SQL, machine learning, web scraping or any of the other topics covered here.

So, I taught myself. It took a few years and I ran into a lot of dead ends along the way, but ultimately I figured it out. In this book, I distill everything I’ve learned to provide a step-by-step guide to doing soccer analytics and get you up and running as quickly as possible.

More courses from the same author: Nathan Braun