I stumbled into it largely by coincidence and luck. As you could imagine, there aren't many people that study computer science who were also relatively high lev

I stumbled into it largely by coincidence and luck. As you could imagine, there aren't many people that study computer science who were also relatively high level soccer players. I'm very fortunate to occupy the very narrow intersection of that obscure venn diagram. I stumbled across some high resolution soccer data during college and began writing a blog that became popular in soccer analytics circles. The company that produced the data that I was scraping eventually hired me to their data science team. I spent a few years with them before I was recruited to my current team. I have never worked in gambling but there are a few people in my sort of role that have that sort of background. It requires a pretty similar set of skills. I am not sure that I could beat the market by a large enough margin to make it worthwhile. It's quite efficient. But for the most part, I'm more interested in understanding the underlying mechanics of tactics than I am interested in predicting the result of games.