The dust had barely settled on Reiss Nelson’s late and potentially season-defining winning goal on Saturday evening when Arsenal were being bestowed with a prestigious honour more than 3,000 miles away.
At the renowned Sloan Conference at MIT, a domain where football for so long has struggled to be embraced by the wider sports data community, the Premier League side won the Alpha Award for best analytics organisation.
And while that may not exercise the average Gunners fan, it is something that will be celebrated by many behind the scenes at a club that was laughed at 11 years ago when they bought the US-based analytics firm StatDNA for £2.16m. That was a time before metrics such as xG were embraced by the common football man, with the numbers game still viewed as an outsiders’ pursuit.
