And The Best Footballer of the Year is -?

Are you a football/soccer fan? If yes then it isn’t news to you that The Best Fifa Football Awards are coming up!

World’s best football players and coaches for the previous year will be recognised on 17th January by FIFA at Zurich. National Team captains, coaches and journalists from all the the world will vote for the best player in 2021 based on the player’s individual performance throughout the year. Analyzing the team and player performances in the new era has improved thanks to Sports Data Analytics.

Data plays a fundamental role in almost every industry. The global sports industry has also evolved over time, with managers and teams becoming more and more receptive to using data to gain a competitive edge. The global sports market is one of the biggest in the world, and it’s expected to balloon to $440.71 billion in 2022.

90 minutes of a football match can create a million data points if captured. These data points can provide actionable intelligence to football sides that can not only impact their performance but also financials and popularity. The Football Association of England (The FA) has identified this and chosen Google Cloud as the official cloud and data analytics partner for the England Teams and St George’s Park, which is their center of technology excellence.

We will find out who the coaches, captains and journalists name as The Best on 17th January, but we can surely find out who had a better year!

Was it Lionel Messi, Robert Lewandowski or Kareem Benzema? Find out which player had the upper hand over the other two with the BigQuery Soccer Data Analysis Lab.

Learn more fundamentals of sports data science by writing and executing queries to query data stored in BigQuery tables today! Use Code 1q-best-21.