Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this “chains football” idea, and let me tell you, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster. I started out thinking, “This will be easy, I’ll just whip something up.” Boy, was I wrong.
First Steps (and Missteps)
My initial plan was pretty basic. I wanted to see how I could, you know, connect different parts of the football data together. The first thing I did was try to get my hands on all of the data sources.
So, there I was, staring at all these data , trying to figure out the best way to smash them together. I figured the player stats were a good place to start.
Getting Down to Business
Once I had my basic setup, I started to actually build stuff. I needed to write some code that could read in all my source data, I spent like, a whole afternoon just cleaning up the player names and making sure everything was consistent.
Next up, I wanted to link players to their teams. Sounds simple, right? Nope. Turns out, team names can be tricky too! Some sources used abbreviations, others used full names, and a few just seemed to make stuff up. More cleaning, more headaches.
The Real Challenge
The real fun (and by fun, I mean pulling-my-hair-out frustration) started when I tried to connect the player and team data with game results. This is where the “chains” part of “chains football” really came into play.
- I had to figure out which players played in which games.
- Then, I had to match those games to the team data.
- And then, I had to figure out how to represent all of this in a way that made sense.
I experimented with a bunch of different approaches. I tried using, but that got messy fast. Then I thought about graphs, which seemed promising, but I’m still not 100% sure that’s the way to go.
Where I’m At Now
So, after all that work, where am I? Well, I’ve got something working. I can, for the most part, connect players to teams to games. I can even pull up some basic stats, like how many goals a player scored in a particular season. But it’s far from perfect.
It’s still pretty rough around the edges, and there’s a ton of stuff I want to improve. I’m thinking about adding more data sources, like maybe injury reports or transfer information. And I definitely need to work on the visualization aspect, because right now it’s just a bunch of text and numbers.
Anyway, that’s my “chains football” journey so far. It’s been a learning experience, to say the least. It just goes to show, even something that sounds simple can turn into a huge project. But hey, that’s the fun of it, right? …Right?
