I am Daryl (Ich heiße Daryl), but I am also known as Đào Hoàng Thái in my home country because it is my birth name! I am a Vietnamese-born (Saigonese, some might say), but I am currently based in Australia. My biggest interest at this point in time is sports analytics, especially using and applying data 🔣 to football (soccer, for yall in the US of A; and sokkah for the Aussies). I also enjoy coding and developing websites and applications through various languages that I learned through my degree. For a coding nerd, I also have a soft spot for designing and game development, though I have never studied both of those fields. But I can design if needed and I have designed a few things in the past.
Well, I am not very active on social media nowadays, but you can always find me through the links below:-
Portfolio:
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Personal blog:
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Email:
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LinkedIn:
- Back in 2019 and early 2020, I used to be a writer for various football blogs like Total Football Analysis and Between The Posts. I mainly analyse teams, players, and matches that I enjoyed watching, including teams in the English EFL Championship, Italian Serie A, France Ligue 1, Japan J1 League, Australia A-League Men, and various other leagues.
You can find all of my articles (not including the ones that are currently in my personal blog) here:
- Starting from early 2020, I initially worked as a video analyst for a semi-professional football (soccer) team based in Brisbane, Australia named Brisbane Olympic under the guidance of the amazing and highly-talented head coach Ben Cahn. My main tasks were to watch our opposition's matches and compile a report on their style of play at the start of the week.
By mid-2021 and throughout 2022, I was doing more coding and developing as part of my degree, and as a result of that, I took on the role of a data analyst at Olympic with the responsibility of providing pre-match and post-match visualisations which includes shot maps, passing networks, detailed passing and touch maps, etc. I have also created a data-driven dashboard using Python and Streamlit to allow the coaching staff and players to access the pre-match and post-match stats in their own time.
- Late 2023, I briefly worked for Melbourne Knights during their 2023 Australia Cup run as a performance analyst and also with Ben Cahn. Similar to my role at Olympic, I was tasked to deliver opposition reports to the coaching staff using data and video analysis, which helped them prepare for their upcoming match. I ended up contributing to what was considered a historic achievement for the club as they reached the semi-final of the Australia Cup and became the second non-professional team in Australia to do so after the cup was rebranded.
- During the same period and into 2024, I also worked as a recruitment analyst for Brisbane Roar with the task to use data and find undervalued players for the club's transfer windows in 2024. While none of my suggestions have been signed (as of yet!), recruitment is a long process and only 10% of the scouted targets actually get considered. So, who knows what might happen?
- Currently, I am working as a software developer for Kashy Australia and (formerly) BSD Robotics in Brisbane. My tasks for each company are quite different since with Kashy, I am responsible for (almost) full-stack development of their customer-facing website and an internal administrator portal. With BSD, I was responsible for creating and managing a cloud-host database and creating a web-host interface that allows the company's administrators and staff to interact with the database.
- I am also a Junior Data Scientist for Entain Australia and New Zealand, having started in August, 2024. While I just started my journey with Entain, I am excited to working with the team and contributing to the work at Entain!
Directly below this profile, I have pinned a few of the projects that I feel very proud about. Make sure you check it out! Besides from the projects below and in my Repositories tab, I have worked on and contributed to:
- 2023 Opta Forum proposal: In early 2023, I had the privilege to work on a proposal about "Using Data to Evaluate the Efficiency of Channel Attacks and Defence" to present as a poster at the 2023 Opta Forum. Despite the limitations and obstacles that I faced along the way, I felt very proud to contribute one of my "crazy" ideas to such an important event in the football (soccer) analytics calendar.
- QUT VRES 2024 research project: Through QUT’s VRES scheme, I worked on a project that used GPS performance data to predict future injuries using a decision tree machine learning model. The project was supervised by Associate Professor Kerrie Mengersen and I received assistance from Professor Paul Wu and PhD student John Worrall, all of whom are members of QUT’s Centre of Data Science. The result confirmed known assumptions made by performance and fitness coaches: if an athlete accelerates/decelerates more often during a lengthy session where they have to cover a lot of distance, the possibility of getting injured and the severity of the injury increases significantly.
- Scouting Handbook 2.0: In 2019, I was inspired by the work of ScoutedFtbl to create my own version of the Scouting Handbook for the Vietnamese audience. After the first version, I wanted to create a second edition of the handbook. However, due to time limitation, I can only finish the design for the pages in the handbook without ever write any scout reports. These designs are also inspired by the card designs of Topps Kick, which is a digital football/soccer card collecting game.
- 2022/23 Graphics for Southampton FC Vietnam: Currently, I am running a Facebook page that acts as a fanpage for the football/soccer club Southampton FC that targets the Vietnamese audience. As part of our rebranding for the 2022/23 season, I was inspired by the designs of the official Southampton FC social media pages while also adding my own touches and repurposing the designs for its respective purposes. I have not arranged all of my designs into a Behance (or something equivalent) yet, but I will probably do this at the end of the 22/23 season.
Below are a few programming languages that I have self-learned or acquired through my degree:
Slightly different to the languages above, here are the languages that I can speak!
- Vietnamese, because of course, if I cannot speak Vietnamese after being born and lived there for almost 18 years, what have I done with my life?
- English. Not proficient, but I consider my English to be good. At least that's what my IELTS score (8.0) told me.
- German. Yeah I teased a little bit of my German at the start, but I can speak a little bit of German (ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch) as I am self-learning the language.