The NTT20 Research Bible
Research underpins everything happening on NTT20. This is the guidebook to the data we gather, the sites we use and the sources we rely upon.
Across the thousands of conversations I’ve had with readers, listeners, and watchers of NTT20, people have asked me two questions more than any other: “Who do you support?” and “How do you stay across 72 teams?” The latter is my favourite to answer, and with a little help from my friends, I’ll answer it in this article.
I’m here to tell you about my Lord and Saviour, my favourite club, and my closest ally: RESEARCH. We have a great relationship, and it started something like this…
The value of research
Being in front of a camera and on the airwaves was all I ever wanted to do. From a young age, I took that ambition very seriously. In practice, that meant developing as a communicator and, to a certain degree, as a performer. Performance — talking and presenting fluently — is the key aspect of broadcasting and its most visible skill.
However, there’s something much less tangible that underpins all quality broadcast work. Without it, it would still be possible to string sentences together with some coherence, but with it, those words can actually deliver information and (I hope) elicit audience interest. Fortunately, I love the hard yards of research as much as the podcast recordings and live broadcasts.
At university, I worked as a researcher/statistician for BT Sport. After I left, my first full-time job was as a researcher on the EFL highlights show. Today, the work of gathering, parsing and filtering information is, like possession, nine-tenths of the law.
Every Monday, from 6am until around midday, I research — watching, reading, gathering, noticing, thinking, noting. Then I travel to the studio, where George and I record the podcast for two hours. Then I edit the podcast audio and video for two more hours. For another hour after that, I schedule tweets and WeTransfer the necessary video files to others within Team NTT20. I leave the studio around 5.30pm.
So, if the Monday Pod workday lasts around 11 hours, more than half of that is spent on research. I never, ever begrudge it. I savour it.
Because of that work, I have compiled a compendium of resources that I rely upon like a reflex: to say this, I need that; to find out that stat, I need to go there. Today, with help from my NTT20.COM colleagues, I’d like to share with you the websites, apps and products that help us with the research aspect of being podcasters, writers, pundits and – let’s have it right – nerds.
The value of watching
With well over 3,000 minutes of EFL football taking place across every full slate in a weekend, there are quite literally not enough hours in the day to watch it all. Still, you have to judge a book by its cover. You have to give it the eye-test.
The characters and inciting incidents of any sport are best understood face-to-face, or at least face-to-screen. The process of watching helps us not only to process the whys and wherefores of each game, but to retain our focus on story-telling. We do not assume that the listeners have watched every game and seen every goal.
Before any stats or data-driven angles come into play, our job is to raise the stakes and serve up the narrative arcs of clubs, players and managers. To do that, we (1) watch live games on Sky Sports, (2) hoover up EFL highlights packages and (3) use Wyscout.
EFL highlights packages
These tend to exist in the following forms:
~10 minute extended packages
The EFL YouTube channel normally releases between four and eight extended highlights packages. I gobble those up.
The clubs themselves have the option to release the extended highlights wherever they’d like to do so, but fewer than half put them on their YouTube channels. The majority of clubs put extended highlights behind a log-in on their official website.
~ 4 minute packages
~ 2 minute packages
SkySports.com, or the Sky Sports app, is where I watch any games whose extended highlights I can’t find without logging into a club site. Often, the difference in length between 4 mins and 2 mins is mostly replays. We like replays. Generally, you’re going to get 6-10 incidents in these packages for a busy match, with a minimum of 4 incidents.
If you are someone without hours on your side, and want to watch all 12 games from a division in one 25-minute stint, SkySports.com would be the best option, in my opinion. Go to the league page, open a tab for each match and cycle through it. Bliss.
Wyscout
George and I pay for Wyscout. We pay a lot for Wyscout, and it seems to keep going up. For just under £1,000 per year, we get the following monthly video allowance:
170 minutes of clips (views)
120 minutes of clips (downloads)
Plus lots and lots of team and player data
I hate that it is so expensive. But we feel it is a professional necessity. On Wyscout, you can find any player in the EFL and watch clips of them performing specific parts of the game. It is crucial for watching players and getting to know their qualities and tendencies. You can also access a certain number of player scouting reports, automatically generated. There’s a thousand other uses. It’s an amazing resource. But many fans or fanalysts have been priced out.
The glossary of resources
Without watching football matches, you can’t spin an authentic yarn. Yet there is so much more value to be added through statistical, analytical and insight-led information. This is what brings context and colour to the story; the gloss, the final sheen.
Here are the sites and resources I use, and why.
FotMob
The one to use on your phone
On a matchday, this is the ‘live scores app’ for me. I love the layout. Love the live stats. Love the visuals and interface. When attempting to stay across multiple events happening at the same time, you can get a good sense of the state of play at a click.
Outside of a matchday, I still use FotMob a lot, especially on mobile. The horizontal nature of stats and tables means similar sites are terrible for mobile device screens – not this one. On the phone, I’ll use FotMob for all sorts of stats and player/team stuff, including xGOT visuals (where players are placing their shots). Of course, we also use their data to furnish our FotMob Corner on the pod.
Sofascore
The one for average positions and side-by-side views
The main thing – pretty much the only thing – that I use Sofascore for is average position maps, but these are very important to me. Although all apps publish a team line-up ‘in formation’, these can’t always be taken as gospel.
Using the average touch maps gives me a better idea of how teams are shaping up in possession and can provide a few tactical pointers to then study more deeply elsewhere. Sofascore also allows for side-by-side comparisons of different player stats from specific matches, or the same player from different matches, which can be really handy.
FBref
The one you can customise
For some, the 1980s spreadsheet-like visuals of FBref are a turn-off. Not for me. The fact that all of the metrics/stats are contained on one page and so easily sortable makes it an incredibly useful resource. Moreover, the data can be easily copied and pasted into Sheets or Excel so you can adapt their information into your spreadsheets.
There is huge detail here… for the Championship. Sadly, the advanced metrics aren’t yet available for League One and League Two. I do love their leaderboard stats at the bottom of each division’s seasonal overview page. This, to me, is beauty:
Streamlit
The one that’s a sandbox of EFL statistics
Streamlit isn’t a football product in itself; it’s an “open-source Python framework for data scientists and AI/ML engineers to deliver interactive data apps”. Basically, smart people use it to build their own stats sites. Specifically, we like Ben Griffis.
Ben has built an incredible resource for EFL fans, with advanced data (via Opta) available for every club in the 72. It’s a huge playground with so much to discover and explore, whether that’s team-specific stuff or overall league rankings. Jump in, nerd out.
WhoScored
The one with the tweakable match centre and goal/shot-type breakdown
WhoScored has a good match centre, which I often use. You can change the match timeline to only include, for example, the period between 60-90 minutes, which could be helpful for seeing how things looked after substitutions were made or following a red card.
In terms of its statistics database, it breaks down a lot of stats into helpful categories. For example, if I want to know how many goals Matt Smith has scored with his head, his left foot and his right foot, I’d go to WhoScored’s detailed player stats tab.
Or, if I wanted to know what proportion of Crawley’s shots come from outside the box (a lot)… this is the place to be.
SoccerSTATS
The one with the ultimate league table… and almost everything else
God, I love SoccerSTATS.
Most sites show a league table, but SoccerSTATS produces my league table of choice. There’s just enough detail and not too much. It’s clean, but with a pop of colour in the right places to guide you.
But that’s not the full extent of SoccerSTATS. Not even close.
On the team page, I’m getting tons of stuff, broken down nicely and well presented: colour-coded recent results, for example, and a results table that gives an instant visual of fixture dispersion and difficulty, as well as certain trends in a team’s results.
Scroll down further and you get tons and tons and tons of other interesting, valuable stats on a team. But it’s not just contained to team pages; it’s all collated and available on a divisional level as well.
As it does on a team page, the ‘Statistics’ button on a division’s page opens up a whole new world. This is my Narnia.
I won’t spam you with any more screenshots, but I’m not lying when I say I would look at the following stats every single week, in one form or another:
Home/Away tables
Form tables (you can choose between 4-6-8-10-12 games – brilliant!)
Run-in analysis (giving you a good breakdown of fixture difficulty, both in games played and those to come, also considering each opponent’s home/away bias)
Goals stats (over/under, both teams scored, number scored/conceded – perfect for my obsession with zeroes and ones!)
Goal times
Lead durations
Scored/conceded first
Opta Analyst
The one with advanced metrics and set-piece stats
For a long time, Opta pretended that the EFL didn’t exist in terms of their publicly available data. Now they’ve gone the other way, and we’ve all benefited from it. Thanks, Opta.
Their Analyst site has detailed stats on a team level and a player level for each of the three leagues. It’s easy to sort, easy to navigate, and a great way to see rankings for advanced metrics.
It’s the best place to get goalkeeper shot-stopping data and set-piece data, with an essential trove of information that helps to peel away those extra layers of team performance.
Transfermarkt
The one for pre-season and player-level research
The best kind of research is pre-season research. Spending a few weeks before the 1-24s with my head buried in research resources and my special information spreadsheet, without the urgency of the in-season content cycle? That’s as good as it gets for me.
And Transfermarkt is the KING for pre-season research, for two key reasons:
It has all of the best, up-to-date transfer information on a division level or a team level, perfectly laid out.
It has a ‘squad by position’ page that gives you a good overview of a squad’s composition.
Here’s an example of a nicely constructed squad, recruited to a specific shape/style (3-5-2) but with other options in certain scenarios:
However, it isn’t confined to pre-season, nor transfers. It’s massive for player research.
If I want to learn about a player’s career, I would almost always go to their Transfermarkt page first. I like to go on the ‘all seasons’ page on the Stats tab and get a snapshot of a player’s career so far.
It’s great for seeing how much a player has actually played and how often they’ve been absent through injury, and for how long. There are also figures for how many appearances a player has played in each position on the pitch, as well as their record against opposition teams and even individual players. And Transfermarkt is rare in that it offers a comprehensive overview of every player’s international career, which can sometimes be useful.
P.S. Because it’s a German product translated into English, some of the phrasing is iconic, such as the ‘Eternal goalscorers’ of the Championship.
TWTD
The one with a lovely form guide
This one gets the nod from Sam:
Sometimes you just need a bell-clear form guide with enough customisation to answer a question. For example, if I wanted to know ‘Which team has secured the most points since X Manager was hired?’ or ‘How do Sunderland’s and Coventry’s points tally up over two seasons?’, I would use TWTD’s form guide page. An Ipswich fan board may seem an odd place to look, but it works. Many of these sites publish the same information, but it’s all about ease of use, and this is easy, intuitive and seamlessly customisable.
Soccerbase
The one for player availability and head-to-head records
And this one gets the nod from Huw:
Soccerbase has a ‘Player Filter’ button on every team’s results page, so you can have a simple overview of matches that were played with or without a specific player – not for ‘win percentage’ guff, which is provided but can be a badly misused statistic, but for information such as availability and consistency of selection. You can choose to include or exclude substitute appearances, too.
Soccerbase offers another service that puts the ‘fun’ into functionality, and that’s its historical head-to-head records between teams. Looking forward to the return of the Steel City Derby next month? Well, don’t.
Wikipedia
The one for historical snapshots
This doesn’t need much introduction. However, my personal Wiki use tends to rely heavily on these two things:
Searching ‘List of [TEAM NAME] seasons’
It’s just a great overview of a club’s footballing history and migration between divisions.
For any question we get about EFL managers, this page is crucial as it has them all in one place, filterable by division, age, nationality and length of tenure. It’s a big old chef’s kiss.
FootballSquads
The one for the number on the jersey
This has become my favourite resource for squad numbers. It’s quick and easy to navigate and it’s laid out brilliantly. If I’m watching a game and I want to know who #29 is, there are plenty of ways of finding that out, but I like this site.
Soccerway
The one with a customisable results list
If you want to have a quick and easy scan of a club’s results specifically in away games, or home games, or only in certain competitions, all presented in a nice, clear, colour-coded layout, then Soccerway can cater to your very specific need.
SoccerAssociation
The one with clear historical matchday tables
Here’s Huw again:
A few different sites offer historical league tables, but I find SoccerAssociation the quickest and simplest to use. It’s done by matchday rather than date, removing the (occasionally useful) intricacies of rearranged fixtures which can inhibit ease of searching, and the layout allows you to instantly click from one matchday to another, without having to manually input dates. It even gives you the league’s top scorers at the time as well. It does cover only the past 25 seasons or so, however, so for older historical tables you’ll want to use 11v11.com, which goes by dates, or Transfermarkt.
The Fishy
The one that tells you which teams are tired
A quirky one from Sam:
I can’t remember where or how I stumbled upon this Grimsby fan website, but I did, and I spotted within their form guides a table of teams categorised by the total miles a team has spent travelling to games in the last 15 days. It’s a hyper-specific bit of information to glean, but at the click of a button you can occasionally unpack an interesting quirk.
No, that’s not a glitch. Hull played an international break friendly in Alanyaspor.
Twitter
The one to peruse, parse and précis
Twitter has long been a great resource for gathering news, information and opinion on football. I owe a lot of my career to Twitter. I was able to build a following before I left university, and have made countless connections.
From a research point of view, I used to get a lot out of it. Now, I don’t enjoy spending time on the site, and it is much more difficult to sift through and find the good stuff.
However, we benefit hugely from our followers. We’ve always loved the Sunday Scouting reports that people send in, and it would be crazy not to use the passion, knowledge and viewing experiences of fans.
Equally, you have to develop an in-built translation system. Things you read between midday on Saturday and 4am on Sunday are likely to be impacted by high emotions… and alcohol. Just parroting what you’ve been told on Twitter would a) be lazy and b) likely cause you to take extreme stances that lose their potency when repeated.
The one thing I’ve always loved and valued is any (thoughtful) take on an opposition from a fan, particularly if it’s positive. Given that, as supporters, a huge proportion of your focus is on your own team and its performance, I always think that recognising the quality of an opposition player means they probably had a blinder.
With Twitter, I try to take everything on board and sift through for gold. It’s a bit like data scouting. It allows you to widen your search and take in a lot more information than you can gain using just your eyes and boots on the ground. But you still have to question everything you’re reading, and develop your own opinions.
NTT20 Squad
The one-stop shop for EVERYTHING EFL
Where before I used to delight in the quality of EFL conversation, information and humour on Twitter, I now get that from NTT20 Squad.
Yes, it’s our own community, and it’s subscriber-only. I’m not trying to sell it to you. But I am very proud of it. Launched in 2021, we managed to establish a community full of good humour, respect and kindness – but also a place where there’s desire for EFL news, knowledge and insight, plus a culture that encourages sharing.
Before every Monday pod, I read through the Championship, League One and League Two chat threads from the weekend. From the fans writing their match recaps, I get detail, emotional reactions, delight, despair and a ton of nice extra context that you’d never get from any other media source.
Weekend Notes on NTT20.COM
The one where we do it for you
Our first ever product on NTT20.COM was Weekend Notes. Over the summer, it underwent a revamp and now it provides a distillation of the EFL weekend in stats, stories and opinion. We do a lot of research, and some of it might not make the pod, but here we provide the best bite-sized overview in newsletter form every Monday morning.
Please add your own resources in the comments. There is surely something we’ve missed. And there are surely sites we could add — and we will update this page with your best suggestions. Let us know what they are and why you use them. Together we can write a great bible for people to keep coming back to.
Incredible list. As a big research man myself, this has introduced a lot of sites I had no idea about. To add, here are a couple others I like to use (go-to sites I used to help build Squawka Stat Packs beyond the angles that Opta provided):
• www.11v11.com - great for head to head records and historical league tables. Has the nice W / D / L colour codes for results and this is always great to see a snapshot of streaks within a particular fixture. Detailed players stats are only available for the Premier League era but I think it has pretty much every fixture... ever.
• www.worldfootball.net - a German site like Transfermarkt, the database is huge and it updates live so you can always get a player's latest goals/games for a specific competition. If you are particular with your assist definitions, I think this uses the more lenient version (including penalties won etc) but it has a top scorer list that breaks down penalties, all-time league tables and other quirks like referee and attendance stats. You can get lost down plenty of rabbit holes.
Everything has been covered. Top work, as is the NTT20 standard.
What a read! I am an ice hockey fan and my favorite resource for hockey is a site called money puck. I wish football had its own version of it!
Basically, the site runs 1000 simulations using the xG data to create a “Deserve-to-win-meter” and also adjusts xG for venue, if the score is close or not, and a few hockey specific things. Every game I watch or attend I check the deserve-to-win-meter to spot check my gut take on which team created more chances and deserved to win.
https://moneypuck.com/g.htm?id=2024020049