Nielsen wins Pitch to the Pros 3 with open-source analytics platform

What he built

The platform addresses one of football analytics’ most persistent headaches: data from different providers arriving in incompatible formats, with different naming conventions and different structures.

A pass is called something different by one system than another. Distances might be in metres in one dataset and yards in another. Mixing data from multiple sources is enormously time-consuming – and often impossible at scale.

Nielsen built a system that ingests data from multiple providers, standardises it through what is known as a “medallion” architecture (a three-stage pipeline that takes raw data, progressively refines and cleans it, and produces a uniform output ready for cross-competition analysis) and serves it through a modern data ‘lakehouse’ built on Databricks.

Hugging Face handles the interface and enables the publication of models and datasets to the wider community.

In practical terms, Nieslen was able to ingest the entire 2022 World Cup — 64 games of tracking data and event data — in 30 minutes. That kind of speed, at that level of scale, is what the platform’s modern architecture makes possible.

Everything is open-source and freely available on GitHub. Any club, federation or analyst can download the full platform, or take just the parts that are useful to them – the ingestion pipeline, the data standardisation layer, the metrics library – and build on top of it.

On top of the core infrastructure, Nielsen rebuilt and extended some existing football analysis tools that had fallen out of maintenance, adding support for modern player tracking data. He also included tools that allow the system to automatically refine its own predictive models over time, effectively letting the AI experiment with different approaches to find the best ones, an idea borrowed from Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve and the broader tradition of evolutionary algorithms.

The dashboard he built is designed to be accessible to non-technical users, with explanatory glossaries built into every page so that coaches and analysts without a data science background can understand what they are looking at.

Nielsen, who has an academic background in HCI (human-computer interaction) cognitive modelling, spent considerable effort ensuring the interface makes sense to anyone who opens it.

His personal passion project within the platform is a goalkeeper deterrent value metric – an attempt to measure something that has always been invisible in football statistics: the shots that were never taken because a goalkeeper’s positioning made them unlikely to succeed.

It is a way of putting a number on the deterrent effect that great goalkeeping creates, capturing value that never appears in save percentages or goals prevented.

What the judges said…

Professor Sumpter, the renowned Soccermatician and co-founder of Twelve who chaired the judging panel, said:

“This is one of the most ambitious football analytics projects I have seen, pushing agentic-AI to its limits. It would be amazing to see a club take this on and develop it.”

Jay Socik, who transitioned from blogging to Head of Recruitment Analysis for an EFL club, added:

“I felt Karsten’s pitch had the most universal applicability in the senior game at professional level of all the finalists. This is a very common discourse right now with clubs and analysts alike. Any tool that can help move a department away from remote scripts and invisible pipelines to much more streamlined and visible, accessible tools is something we should all push for. Well done Karsten.”

The finalists

Nielsen was one of four finalists who each delivered a 10-minute live pitch to the expert panel:

• Ryan Inghilterra — Was the best pass really playable?
• Pedro Satorre-Mulet — Shot classification and goal probability estimation
• Karsten Nielsen — Open-source serverless analytics platform (Winner)
• Peter Hassard — From Veo footage to player data

The judging panel comprised:

• Professor David Sumpter (Co-Founder, Twelve)
• Jay Socik (Head of Recruitment Analysis, EFL club)
• David Laszlo (Analyst, Hungarian Football Association and Twelve Prompt Engineer)
• Nicole Kozlova (Ukraine international, Scottish Women’s Premier League Player of the Year and Twelve Data Scientist)

Third edition of Pitch to the Pros

Nielsen becomes the third winner of Pitch to the Pros, the competition that gives TGG x Twelve Premium Members the rare opportunity to present their data-driven ideas directly to leading practitioners.

The two previous winners were:

Jeffrey Eyestone won the inaugural contest in May 2025 with his xT-GK metric — a new way of rating goalkeepers that factored in their attacking distribution, their ability to plan against specific opposition, and crucially the way their defensive presence affected Expected Threat. Professor Sumpter told Eyestone at the time: “You said you were going to revolutionise goalkeeping — and you weren’t joking.”

Peter Hassard won Pitch to the Pros 2 in December 2025 with a sophisticated new modelling approach for shot prediction analysis, building a Streamlit app using SkillCorner tracking data. Sumpter described it as raising “an intriguing question: is it possible — even with a small possibility — to predict a goal minutes before it happens?”

The standard across all three editions has been exceptional. As Sumpter noted after the first final, the level of work on display is “higher than you see in many clubs, to be honest.”

Become a TGG × Twelve Analytics Member

Pitch to the Pros is open exclusively to TGG × Twelve Analytics Members. Membership is £25 a month or £200 for the year. As a member you also get:

• • 2 × Masterclasses per month delivered by leading industry experts
  • Access to a library of Masterclasses covering topics from Quantifying Your Game Model to Using Large Language Models for Scouting — more than 12 hours of content and growing
  • Free access to online conferences, including Big Data and Scouting & Recruitment events

• Inclusion in our invite-only Slack channel, where we share insights, ideas, job opportunities and offers
• Your own personal profile on the TGG website
• Expert feedback on your work at Pitch to the Pros