Alright, so lemme tell you about this thing I was messing around with today: Braga versus Hoffenheim. Sounds like a soccer match, right? Well, it kinda was, but in my own messed-up, techy way.
First off, I needed data. Real, juicy data about these two teams. I started scraping some sports websites, you know, the ones that have all the stats. I used Python, because, duh, it’s the easiest way to get that stuff done. I built a quick scraper using Beautiful Soup – yeah, I know, sounds fancy, but it’s really just a tool to pick apart HTML.
Next, I had to clean the data. This is always the gross part. Dates in different formats, weird abbreviations, inconsistent naming… the works! I used Pandas for this. Pandas is like the Excel of Python – lets you wrangle data into nice tables. I spent a good hour just fixing typos and standardizing everything. Ugh.
Okay, so I got my clean data. Now what? I wanted to see how these teams stacked up. I decided to focus on a few key stats: goals scored, shots on target, possession percentage, and fouls committed. Nothing too crazy, just the basics.
Then, I needed to visualize this data. Because tables are boring. I used Matplotlib to make some bar charts and scatter plots. One chart compared the average goals scored per game for both teams. Another showed the relationship between shots on target and goals scored. You know, trying to find patterns.
I also wanted to predict who would win if they played. So, I decided to try a simple machine learning model. I used scikit-learn to train a logistic regression model. I fed it the historical data, telling it who won in the past based on those stats. It’s not perfect, but it gave me a rough idea.
Results? Well, according to my model, Braga would have a slight edge. But honestly, it’s just a bunch of numbers. Soccer is unpredictable. A red card, a lucky bounce… anything can change the game.
Learnings? I spent too much time cleaning data! Next time, I need to find a better data source. And maybe try a more sophisticated model. But hey, it was a fun little project. Good way to kill an afternoon.
I ended up creating a small dashboard in Streamlit to display all the visualizations and the prediction. Super basic, but it makes it easy to see all the info at a glance. Nothing fancy, just some text and charts.
So yeah, that’s my Braga vs. Hoffenheim experiment. Pretty basic, but always good to practice and learn something new. Now, time for a beer!
