About penaltyblog

penaltyblog is where football meets cutting-edge data science — delivering deep-dive research, tutorials, and tools for clubs, analysts, and fans who want more than just xG.

Founded by Dr. Martin Eastwood, an experienced data scientist and long-time football analytics contributor, the site explores how modern modelling techniques — including machine learning and Bayesian statistics — can bring clarity to the beautiful game.

Martin has consulted for professional football clubs around the world, football governing bodies, and player agencies. He has built widely used open-source Python tools for football analytics and consistently published in-depth work that is both technically rigorous and practically useful. His work often focuses on Bayesian statistical modelling — a powerful approach for incorporating uncertainty and prior knowledge into football analysis. His code and models have been used by analysts, researchers, and consultants globally — including those doing professional work at all levels of the game.

What You’ll Find Here

• In-Depth Analysis: Advanced statistical explorations of player and team performance, tactical decisions, and betting markets.
• Tutorials & Walkthroughs: Step-by-step guides to help others learn and apply football analytics techniques in Python.
• Open-Source Code: Widely-used modelling tools and datasets built to be used, extended, and adapted by the community.

Tools and Data Sources

penaltyblog utilizes many techniques, including Machine Learning and Bayesian Stastics, to analyze and interpret large amounts of football and betting data gathered from various public sources, ensuring comprehensive and accurate analyses.

Work With Martin

Martin is available for consulting, prototyping, and custom analytics solutions for football clubs, agencies, and organisations. If you're looking to:

• Build or evaluate a model
• Integrate new data sources into your scouting or tactical workflows,
• Or simply talk through how data science can support decision-making at your club,

then get in touch.

Attribution & Use

You’re welcome to reuse and adapt material from penaltyblog under the following conditions:

• Provide credit and link back to the original source.
• Use it only for non-commercial purposes.
• Let us know how you're using it — we love hearing how others build on this work.