✉️ What to expect from Plot the Ball in 2025
My Week in Sport(s) ⚽️ 🏀 🎾 🏏 ⚾️
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: ✉️ this year’s new format and 🏆 last year’s best pieces.
✉️ What to expect from Plot the Ball in 2025
Last January, I wrote about my conception of the purpose of professional sport to introduce my plans for the newsletter in 2024:
A number of recent comments from top athletes have made me reflect on the extent to which this framing is true for competitors themselves, too.
The word ‘joy’ came up several times in an interview given by NBA star Luka Dončić to The New York Times in December:
“I had joy playing basketball. I had joy going to Madrid. It was fun for me.”
Former Irish rugby international Ronan O’Gara — now a highly-rated coach — also spoke with The Guardian last month about the “wonderful emotions” the game gave him.
On a fundamental level, that might be all there is to it.
Playing, watching and following sport gives us all wonderful emotions — and changing how I approached publishing this newsletter certainly increased the amount of joy I got out of sport last year.
I now want to take things on a step further in 2025 — to help you all get more joy out of sport too.
I’m delighted that this newsletter’s audience already has a broad geographical spread, reflecting the multitude of sports, teams and athletes that I enjoy watching and thinking about.
And the format of this year’s weekly newsletter will be broader in scope, with a wider range of topics covered in each edition than during 2024.
My focus in 2025 is simple.
I want to use data to learn interesting new things about the sports I follow, describe them succinctly and communicate them to you regularly — so that you can learn more about the teams and athletes you enjoy watching, and deepen your appreciation for their quality in the process.
So, each week, My Week In Sport(s) will include five sections covering five different sports: two slightly longer sections — each accompanied by a data visualisation — as well as three shorter, text-only sections.
Through my work, I hope that you’ll discover new sports, teams and athletes to follow and appreciate too. There will likely be sports you’re not familiar with and names you don’t recognise in each edition, but you can trust that anyone I’m putting in front of you will be joyful to watch and interesting to learn about.
In 2025, I hope that you get even more out of Plot the Ball — and that this newsletter helps you take even more joy from the world of sport.
🏆 The best of Plot the Ball in 2024
The five pieces below are the three most popular editions of the newsletter I published last year, along with two of my favourites which received less attention.
Yamal and Cubarsí are both on track to become the most heavily used teenagers of the club’s modern era. Partway through their age-17 seasons, they have already clocked up over 2,000 league minutes.
NBA teams are no more or no less than the players they put on the floor — and you could make a case that, for instance, Draymond’s regular-season Warriors and the playoff Warriors are two subtly different teams.
Bracketing off the question of what Alcaraz ‘should’ do, I’m fascinated by the idea of his love for ‘playing battles’ — and curious about how we could find evidence for or against this in the statistical record.
The different styles of cricket manufactured in the sport’s two biggest T20 competitions are evident, then. What’s more, we can be pretty confident that these differences are not down to the batting talent on display.
No one who has recorded a similar stolen base percentage over the last two seasons comes remotely close to matching the rate at which he hits home runs, something he’s done in just over 7% of his plate appearances so far in 2024.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday January 10th.
New format sounds great! Best of luck!