Efficient & Automated Football Data Analytics in MLS with Kestra

A Major League Soccer (MLS) club has effectively leveraged Kestra, an automated data orchestration tool, to enhance its football data analytics capabilities, driving both athletic and financial decisions. By transitioning from a challenging Papermill notebook-based system to Kestra, the club now efficiently manages data pipelines, processes various types of data, and utilizes machine learning models to support player recruitment, match analysis, and scouting. Kestra's web-based control plane enables seamless creation and monitoring of workflows, facilitating the ingestion of data into AWS S3 and a PostgreSQL server. Additionally, the tool allows for the easy management of bespoke KPIs and supports polyglot programming through Docker containers, which streamlines the integration of Python and R codebases. As the analytics team moves towards developing a possession value model to quantify player contributions, the club continues to optimize its performance and strategy, benefiting from Kestra's scalability and versatility.