A Note on the Expertise and Methodology Behind Profspur Analysis

As well as the expertise I'm not claiming.

I gather that a lot of people who subscribe to this newsletter and follow me on social media value my level-headed approach to Spurs and to analyzing the game of football more broadly. That means a lot to me, because I started this hobby not only for love of Spurs and love of football, but also as part of a deep commitment to intellectual integrity.

Put simply, I think a lot of football discourse is attention-driven, sensationalistic, and susceptible to cooptation by trolls and banter-merchants. One thing I can do to help avoid that kind of negative attention or susceptibility to what’s sometimes a poisoned well of football discourse is to be up-front with you about how I approach my analysis on here and which forms of expertise I do and do not possess.

Who I Am (and Am Not)

I took the moniker ‘profspur’ not only as a Tottenham-related pun, but also because I’m a professor in my day job. What kind of professor is hard even for me to answer, because I’m appointed in two different departments and have very broad academic interests. My DPhil (or PhD, but at Oxford, where I studied, it’s a DPhil) involved primarily historical research in a pretty traditional sense, and the bulk of my peer-reviewed publications are in a subfield called historical epistemology, which is a fancy way of describing the study of the history of methodology. That means I’m fascinated by developments in how we attempt to know things—to know more and to know reliably—over time. A more recent, secondary branch of my research is in the field of cultural analytics, which means using computational tools and quantitative methods to analyze large amounts of digitized text (this is a version of what computer scientists and machine learning researchers call natural language processing (NLP)).

What I hope you take away from this is that my professional research and qualifications span a few different methods—both qualitative-historical and quantitative-computational—but the latter is a newer research path for me and not part of my formal doctoral training. Nevertheless, as someone who works on methodology as an area of study, I have a pretty firm grasp of the challenges of drawing conclusions from different types of evidence and how to address such challenges.

I also want to make clear that while it’s fair to say I’m obsessed with Tottenham and with football, and have played the game at a decent level (for someone who grew up in the US) with real coaching, I’m not a tactics expert. I watch a lot of football—usually around 10 hours per week—but I have no professional coaching or tactics training, nor have ever worked in professional football analysis. If you’re looking for tactics experts, I highly recommend The Athletic’s Jon Mackenzie (jon mackenzie.bsky.social) and Alex Barker, as well as Nathan A. Clark (nathanaclark.bsky.social) of The Extra Inch podcast.

How I Approach Football Analysis

You can think of my approach here as a hybrid of match analysis—especially of how individual player attributes work or don’t work in a system—and light statistical analysis. I say ‘light’ because at the moment I don’t have enough time outside of my day job to do sophisticated analytics of the sort that, for example, Michael Caley does in his newsletter (which I also recommend). Rather than doing a pure data analytics newsletter, I’m trying out a mixed methods newsletter that draws on the range of my professional skillset described above. People have the tendency to pit ‘watch football with your eyes!’ and ‘stats nerd!’ against one another, which I think is wrong. If I’m in a boxing match, I don’t want to fight with one hand tied beyond my back. Picking ‘watch with your eyes!’ or ‘stats nerd!’ to fight ignorance or confusion in football is fighting with one hand tied behind your back. At profspur analysis I fight with both hands. Figuratively. Figuratively!

To give you a sense of what ‘mixed methods’ means in practice: My process is not to start with positional analysis diagrams or with statistics, but rather to start with what I observe as a principle in action and then see to what extent my observation accords with the data. For example, I observe that Ange Postecoglou has Spurs’ press more organized this season than last, with more capability in the front line and better coverage out of possession. So then I take a look at statistical measures, like PPDA, final-third possession won, shots created from high turnovers, etc. Where my observations and the data don’t align, I then look for ways to explain why that is. This is more or less how I operate. In analysis, I value explanation above everything.

In addition to football analysis, I also plan to do some book reviews and more philosophical, epistemological, and synthetic commentary on the game, its rules, conventions, and contexts. Examples of what I mean by ‘philosophical,’ ‘epistemological,’ and ‘synthetic’ commentary are below, in case you’re interested: