Italian translation at settesei.it
It has been a very productive year for the Match Charting Project. The MCP is a collaborative effort to record every shot of professional tennis matches. Since 2013, over one hundred volunteers have charted matches, ranging from 1970’s grand slam finals to marathon Big Four clashes to obscure challenger and ITF matches. The resulting dataset is unique, and represents a rare, public resource in a sport where the best stuff is usually locked up by tournaments, federations, and the companies that collect data for them.
The 6,000th match–a Bucharest quarter-final between Kristyna Pliskova and Patricia Maria Tig, one of over two hundred charted by Zindaras–comes less than six months after the 5,000th. In that time, we’ve logged a huge number of French Open and Wimbledon matches, in addition to every tour-level final. As part of an ongoing sub-project, we’ve also boosted our coverage of vintage major semi-finals, adding many men’s semis from the late 80’s and early 90’s, plus all the vintage women’s semi-finals from the French Open and Wimbledon for which we’ve found video.
(Maybe you could help us find some of the video we’re looking for?)
The resulting data–much of which is easily accessible to researchers on GitHub–has made it possible to research subjects on a scale never before possible. For example, early in the Wimbledon fortnight, I delved into how net play has changed, using shot-by-shot stats from the 1970s to the present at the All England club. And after Simona Halep’s pristine performance in the final, John Burn-Murdoch used MCP data to contextualize her stunningly low unforced error rate.
More casual fans are also steadily discovering the wealth of available MCP data. For all of these thousands of matches, you can look up thousands of match-specific stats, with easy comparisons to player averages. If you’ve never explored these pages, I highly recommend that you do so. One recently-added match that shows off the depth of the MCP stats is the 1987 Australian Open semi-final between Ivan Lendl and Pat Cash. You can also explore aggregate stats for particular players, on pages like this one, for Sloane Stephens.
If you find any of this interesting, now’s a great time to pitch in. Charting matches isn’t rocket science: it requires only attention to detail and a basic knowledge of tennis. Also helpful are a love of the sport and an interest in minutiae–two qualities shared by many of the most prolific contributors. I’ve written more about the benefits of charting here, and when you’re ready to get started, here’s the official Quick Start Guide.
While tennis remains a bit of an analytical backwater, we continue to make progress. We’re completely independent of the tours and federations spending untold sums on consultants that seem to always produce shiny new websites with little new data. This site isn’t shiny (to put it mildly!) but we’re unencumbered by the politics, conflicting priorities, and sheer inertia that hold back so much of the sport. This Match Charting Project milestone is just the latest reminder that the most interesting work often happens far from the biggest platforms.