Our 5 favourite Toolbox features of 2023

It’s been another big year for us here at Twenty3, especially on the Toolbox side of things.

Whether it’s coincidence or some kind of destiny, ‘23 is one that, to me, has felt like our most significant to date.

So as our namesake year draws to a close, we thought we’d take a look back at some of our favourite features and additions to the Twenty3 Toolbox in 2023.

The Match Centre

Inevitable. The Match Centre has been the biggest project we’ve worked on for a while now, probably since we started building the Event Lab back in early 2021. 

And even though we had a feeling that we were creating something with vast potential when we were building it, the feedback and uptake that we’ve received since launching has far exceeded our expectations.

Such is its popularity that the Match Centre, which only launched a few months ago, has already become our number one most used tool, and now sits proudly as the shining star atop our Toolbox tree.

From a product perspective, I think what we’re most proud of – apart from it holding the record for ‘least number of heated debates’ within Twenty3 – are the areas where we had to push the boundaries of our existing technology and infrastructure, and in some places even build entirely new systems to support what we wanted to do. 

Without a great deal of effort and teamwork from many different people within the business, launching the Match Centre simply wouldn’t have been possible, so a special thanks must go to all involved in the project.

As an example, we had to completely redesign how we generate graphics to be much more lightweight and speedy. 

Whilst the ability to create graphics within about 30 seconds using our Smart Graphics tool isn’t exactly slow, the whole philosophy and approach of the Match Centre was to make sure that every aspect was truly capable of handling the unique demands of a live match scenario. 

Therefore, to achieve this, we had to start from scratch to heavily reduce that graphics creation figure from half a minute to much closer to five seconds.

If you’d like to find out more about the Match Centre, check out our reveal article from July here.

Interactive Visualisations

Granted, this is sort of cheating given it’s a feature of the Match Centre, but I’m going to include it anyway, as, for me, it’s less about the feature as it stands and more about what it means for the future.

As I mentioned above, there were certain parts of the Match Centre where we really had to push the limits on the way we currently do things. Interactive viz was another one of those. 

Up until this point, visualisations – save but a few graphs and charts in our Analyse tool – have always been static images that we generate and pull into outputs like graphics. 

So to have the ability to now interact with them, to hover over different events on a pitch to see more information or to play around with different filters like the match period filter – and see those events shift and evolve in front of you – is really exciting for us.

We’ll definitely be adding to our selection of interactive viz in the Match Centre in 2024, but this also opens up the door for other exciting things like a dedicated, visual interrogation tool or a more experimental, ‘whiteboard’ kind of feature as well. 

No promises, but these are certainly ideas that we’re starting to explore.

Stat Packs

While our Stat Packs feature has flown a little bit under the radar, it’s a really exciting one from a Product point of view, as it involves adapting a tool that we hadn’t initially envisioned this use case for. In this instance, Power Reports (which you can read a little more about here).

We’d originally built Power Reports to give professional teams the power to automate the production of their routine, but incredibly time-consuming, reports; things like opposition analysis reports, post-match performance reports or recruitment dossiers. 

All entirely essential documents, but all painfully slow to create manually. And, as we know, time is a precious commodity, particularly in the lightning-fast world of professional football.

However, working with media companies and, in particular leading broadcasters, we realised that our Power Reports feature also had the capability to automate the stat packs that pundits, commentators and newsrooms rely on so heavily. 

So, having successfully launched that offering this year and seen how beneficial it has provided for some of the world’s best football broadcasters, we’re excited to see how this new use case pushes and evolves our Power Report feature set in 2024 and beyond.

Set Piece By Zone Visualisations

While this may seem a relatively small addition in comparison to big developments like the Match Centre or the ability to produce 20+ page stat packs in minutes, we feel our Set Piece by Zone visualisations are pretty cool for a couple of reasons.

For one, set piece and corner analysis is a relatively under-appreciated and under-visualised side of the game, so it was nice to add something specific here that allows users to be able to garner some real insight into both team routines and player delivery.

And secondly, we introduced this visualisation to Power Reports after requests from a few different customers, so it’s a nice one for us to be able to bring to life, initially for them, but then to distribute it to our wider set of diehard Toolbox users too.

If you’d like to see a nice showcase of the viz, then check out our article on the Premier League’s Set Piece specialists.

Event Lab Improvements

On paper, this might seem a little less glamorous than some of the above developments, but, as a team, we feel strongly about how we’ve evolved and improved the Event Lab this year. 

If we had to give one tool the ‘Ravel Morrison Award for Untapped Potential’ then it would probably be the Event Lab. 

It’s definitely the most powerful tool we have in terms of the amount of really incredible and creative ways in which you can explore and interact with the data. However, that flexibility can also make it a little hard to pick up in places, so it’s exciting for us to be able to revisit the tool and give it some further fine-tuning.

As a little run down of some of those additions, we’ve done some work under the hood to make exploration of any data saved under a ‘view’ lightning fast. 

In the coming release, we’ll be adding a new feature to allow users to expand the rows in the main table to see a match-by-match breakdown of the stats represented at the top level of aggregation – this should make workflows around performance tracking for teams or players far easier. 

And we’ve also made some performance improvements that should make a significant difference to the speed in which certain areas of the tool load. 

While on paper these might seem like small developments, in practice they’ll have a big impact on our customers’ workflows and that is what matters most to us.

So, that’s a wrap on my five favourite Toolbox features of 2023. We’ve got plenty of exciting things up our sleeves for 2024, but I will not be responsible for any spoilers, so stay tuned until next time.