The Power BI Football Analysis Model

Power BI is Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) tool providing business intelligence capabilities and interactive visualizations in a easy to use and intuitive way. To find out more about Power BI use this link to the Microsoft website

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Recently voted as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Power BI is consistently seen as one of the top products for completeness of vision and furthest up in the ability to execute within the Leaders’ quadrant.

My own experience of Power BI

Having used Power BI in a business context for many years my view is that it is a superb BI tool in terms of its development capabilities and user experience.

About the Power BI football analysis model. Why build it?

Because I get a kick out of seeing what you can do with data and as a massive football fan why not build a footie model. Yes I am a football loving nerd! The starting point was to take fixture results from the last five seasons (source www.football-data.co.uk ) as shown below:

Using SQL coding and Power BI, our model turns this simple line of data into powerful analytics of historical trend analysis as well as likely future outcomes.

Historic Trend Analysis – Relevance for the Wider Market

As the season unfolds we will use the model to analyze trends and key turning points which is so relevant to today’s business intelligence analytical world. Take this trend analysis for season 2018/19 for Burnley

• The running total shows Burnley almost flat-lining until the end of 2018 – culminating in a thrashing at home on Boxing Day by Everton (I was there).
• From 2019 onwards their results are so strong that Burnley over-perform against trend for the remainder of the season.
• If this was a product line, salesperson or store you would want to know what caused such a sensational turnaround.

Yes I realise that finding this kind of analysis interesting makes me a saddo but I don’t care!