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

I look at women's football through data and my own playing experience. I want to make visible the phenomena of the game that don't always reveal themselves from the final result or a single statistic.

On this site I analyse teams, players, matches and the development of the sport. My goal is to offer interesting, understandable and well-founded observations. I explain what the data shows, what interpretations can be made from it, and which questions it cannot yet answer.

My background

I'm 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.

My international playing career gave me the chance to experience different styles of play, coaching cultures and environments. As a defender, I learned to pay particular attention to the team's collective play, use of space and the relationships between players. This experience shapes the questions I ask about the game when I analyse it.

After my playing career, I have continued working in football as a coach, in board roles and as an expert. In these roles I have also been able to examine the game and its development from outside the pitch.

My studies in business and economics have strengthened my interest in data and in exploring phenomena and the connections between them. I'm interested in how observations can build better understanding, and how that understanding can support decision-making.

From playing experience to analysis

In my work I combine experience from inside the game with a desire to understand it systematically through data. Playing experience helps identify the essential questions and assess what observations mean on the pitch. Data makes it possible to check whether those observations hold across a broader dataset and whether there are other explanations for them.

My focus is on women's football. I want to make analytics clear, useful and interesting also for readers who don't work with data. I hope my writing offers new perspectives on a familiar game and concrete things to watch for in the next match.