About me
I’m Ben — a data journalist based in London.
Outside of my day job at Insurance Insider — a financial trade publication — I spend a lot of time watching, reading about and thinking about sport.
For a while, I wrote exclusively about rugby: on my blog, on a previous Substack and as a freelance contributor to RugbyPass+.
At the start of 2022, however, I decided to branch out — and launched Plot the Ball.
About Plot the Ball
In this newsletter, I’m using data to tell better stories about the world of sport.
What does that mean?
One of my strongest beliefs is that the best sportswriting starts by addressing the detailed specifics of the on-field action and zooms out — rather than beginning and ending with imprecise narrative tropes.
With that in mind, at Plot the Ball I’m aiming to deliver substantive analysis of interesting on-field trends across the range of sports that I follow — accompanied by clear visualisations of relevant data.
You will be able to find the code I've written to analyse and visualise the data for each newsletter on GitHub.
