From August 2022 to May 2023, I had the opportunity to experience the life of a researcher as a participant of NTU’s URECA¹ program. I’ll write a full recap of my journey as an undergraduate researcher after the next academic year, but in many ways, this was the perfect project for me. It allowed me to work on a field that I have been passionate about for many years - sports analytics in football.

Working with Professor John Komar from NIE², we built an Expected Goals model from the last three seasons of Data in the Singapore Premier League, and applied it on top of research conducted by another URECA student to identify which styles of play are effective in Singapore, and which teams use them the most.

The full paper and my findings are below if you’re interested in taking a look at it! If there’s interest in an in-depth runthrough of the code that I wrote for it, I’ll be happy to write that up as well.

[1] - Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus

[2] - National Institute of Education