Data, context, and fresh perspectives on women's football

Offside Analytics is a football analytics site focused on women's football. Its purpose is to bring to light phenomena in the game that don't always reveal themselves from the final result or a single statistic.

The site examines teams, players, matches and the development of the sport through data. The goal is not to use statistics as a justification for a ready-made opinion, but to build interesting, understandable and well-founded observations on their basis. At the same time, it makes visible what the data says, what can be interpreted from it, and what cannot yet be concluded from it.

The author

Behind Offside Analytics is me, Maija Saari. Football has been a central part of my life for more than two decades. I won three Finnish championships with FC Honka and played eight years as a professional in the top leagues of Sweden and Norway. For the Finnish women's national team, I played 94 matches, took part in the UEFA Women's Euro 2009 and served as captain from 2012 to 2016.

After my playing career, I have continued working in football as a coach, in board roles and as an expert.

My studies in business and economics have created a foundation for my interest in data, phenomena and the connections between them.

Offside Analytics combines these two perspectives: experience from inside the game and a desire to understand it more systematically through data. The focus is on women's football, but the broader goal is to make football analytics clear, useful and interesting also for those who don't work with data.