How Sam Kerr became one of the greatest strikers in women’s football by ABC News (Australia)

Sam Kerr is one of the greatest strikers that women's football has ever seen. But finding data to show just how good she is and how she stacked up against other greats of the game proved to be an immense challenge.

So we decided to rectify this.

We scoured archives, old news articles, social media and contacted Kerr’s old clubs in an effort to track down video of every, single one of her professional goals. Despite the fact that she only started playing professionally in 2008, the lack of coverage of women’s football compared to the men’s game, made it tough to find anything from her early career.

After the lengthy process of finding the videos, we then analysed the footage and produced a custom database that captured how she scored, which foot (or head) she scored with and even produced a tool that allowed us to capture the X, Y coordinates of where she scored from.

The result was a dataset the showed Kerr’s evolution from a nervous teen to a goal-scoring machine. We combined several data points to produce a 3D shot map that showed how her attack matured over time and incorporated the video with the data to show our audience her road to super stardom.