Remembering Om Arvind

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Sometimes things happen in our small community that affect everyone. Sadly, on May 18th, a beloved member of our community, Om Arvind, passed away. The best way we could think to go about remembering him here at ASA was by, well, remembering him. So we got everyone together, and people shared some stories. Below is the edited version of that conversation.

Om Arvind, 1998-2024

Remembering Om Arvind, an ASA Round Table

Kieran Doyle

Hey everybody, thanks for popping in. As we've all got the news now, a treasured member of our ASA and soccer community as a whole, Om Arvind, passed away recently. Om was a huge contributor to the work we've done on the women's side and he was always somebody to bounce ideas off of tactically, analytically, whatever. He made me a better coach, made me smarter at watching the games (or the spreadsheets). But I mostly just miss Om the dude. Talking smack about Lakers coaches and Luka magic and trolling people on twitter.

Drew Olsen

Only met Om once in real life, at NWSL Cup 2022 in DC. A year prior I had edited his first article for us on Sophia Smith, so we remarked that it was fitting that we were meeting in-person to watch her play in the Championship game. Then we bonded over how shitty Northern Virginia traffic is. I just remember being in awe that a bunch of "strangers" (it was at least me, Arielle, Arianna, Jay, Nate, Joel, and Om, and probably others I'm forgetting) could meet up at a bar before the game and despite never having met before it was like we'd been friends for years already - because we had! I'm so full of regret that I didn't talk to him more when I had the chance. Thanks for doing this, guys.

Benjamin Bellman

When I was on hiatus for grad school I was still following all the developments, articles, dialogue. Om was helping lead the conversation and kept me engaged. He got my eyeballs on the NWSL data and helped me understand g+ through practical examples before I was ever working with that data myself. His Sophia Smith article might be the best thing on the website. It’s so insightful, it pulls together so many kinds of media and information to tell a rich data story that anyone who knows the game can understand if they really put in the effort to read it. And to put it together, he engaged so many different ASAers to learn as much  as he could and deliver something amazing to the community. I have immense gratitude for what he gave us and immense sadness and regret that I won’t get to be his friend the way so many of us were.

Mike Imburgio

That article is such a good example of how good Om was at this, and he really only got better until he chose to step back from it. There’s a long list of things that I wish I could do as well as he did. He made complicated stuff simple. I’ve explained the relationship between xG and receiving g+ many times and he did it in that article probably better than I ever have. He could think about soccer in a way that I can’t and really changed the way I think about a lot of things with some of the stuff he wrote.

Overwhelmingly though, the thing that stands out when I think about Om is that the dude was hilarious. He just cracked me up consistently with these little quips. I feel like he took his ability to squeeze a lot of meaning into a single sentence and channeled it into this dry sarcasm that got me every time. I’m smiling thinking about it now. He was a really unique guy in this community in the most awesome way, and not just because of what he wrote.

Kieran Doyle

The little quips are what stick with me the most. I remember so many times him just nuking someone with a 1 liner, in a genuinely funny, not mean, way.

It's hard to even remember a specific one, they were just so snappy.

Matthias Kullowatz

I loved laughing at Om’s quips.

Mike Imburgio

I totally agree. I remember one time he’d written something and a guy had disagreed with something he wrote and Om was genuinely trying to explain it in the comments on Twitter. But as often happens it devolved into the guy being like “well you should rethink your opinion” and Om just quote tweeted it like “I got cooked folks”

The timing in the context of the conversation where he had previously spent several comments elaborating on what he’d wrote just did me in

Paul Harvey

That comment leads me to the thing that stood out about Om to me, although I only really knew him from writing and twitter - he had a ton of time for people who were probably never going to change their perspective. Even that great post on data vs “the eye test” is fundamentally about reaching a certain kind of person, one who I usually just give up on after a few interactions.

His approach to people matched his approach to data. Honesty, openness, and a desire for connection.

Mike Imburgio

That thumbnail!

Tony El-Habr

I never had the pleasure of meeting Om, but I really enjoyed his writing. His style was like a breath of fresh air—technical enough to provide detail without bogging you down. He had a unique ability to weave witty commentary with his technical insights, making his work feel both authentic and conversational. These are qualities that many, including myself, strive to achieve in our own writing.I often turned to Om's insights on the women's game. In particular, I remember reading one of his articles on the USWNT before attending a friendly match between the USWNT and Jamaica in 2021. Thanks to Om, I felt like I was a true ball knower,  looking out for things tactically that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed. That is a perfect example of what good writing does--it makes us more knowledgeable and helps emphasize why we love the things we do.

Jay Carter

I only got to meet Om once at the NWSL Final in DC. We had a really nice time talking woso across a few different leagues. He was so damn sharp and knowledgeable and nice and easy to talk with and it's a ridiculous loss that he's gone.

Carlon Carpenter

I had the pleasure of meeting Om twice, both times after having spoken to him online for years. The best thing you can say about people, and in this case friends, you meet online is it feels like you've known them for your entire life. With Om it was exactly that. The first time was a brief encounter in DC when I was visiting family, but the second time was in England when he was visiting for the women's Euros in 2022.

He and I plus a group of friends met in a pub down the street from Brentford's stadium (The Bell & Crown right on the Thames) before Germany played Austria in the quarter finals. We probably spent maybe two hours there but it felt like we could have spoken there for the entire night. His passion on the game and ability to seamlessly switch between detailed analysis & blatantly mocking the very stuff he was speaking about was second to none.

We often kept in contact during WhatsApp message in the years since, but those two hours was the time that I realised that this stupid/dorky/cool online soccer space that I've stumbled upon in recent years was a whole lot more than that - It was a real place to make life-long connections: Whether or not these people know it. I will miss him.

Kieran Doyle

It's cool to have this conversation today, as Bay and Chicago play the highest attendance NWSL game ever, and 2nd highest attended WoSo game in the U.S. period since the ‘99 World Cup. The league and WoSo as a whole has come so far even in the last 3 years. He was part of that.

Plus another BaySA win with a Kundananji masterclass, a player he was telling people about three years ago.

Arielle Dror

He really did pop up everywhere…I think I told some of y’all this but a couple years ago I was in DC for a conference and Om and I decided to meet up, which was funny at the time because I didn’t even realize he lived here. It was the worst of DC summer…just gross and humid but also during a COVID surge so we ended up sitting outside at Busboys and Poets. I really cannot stress enough just how disgusting it was outside, one of the really bad DC July afternoons. We’re snacking and he tells me that he doesn’t live in DC, he actually lives something like an hour outside the city and drove in just to hang out. I remember just being absolutely dumbfounded that he came all the way into the city to sit in a swamp with a virtual stranger. I think when you’re in online spaces a lot, you hope people measure up to what you expect IRL. The kindness and humor Om exuded online was all there in person too and I’m grateful we got to meet in DC a couple times.

Separate note, @Arianna Cascone would probably agree that he was a dreeaaaammm to edit for (no offense to everyone else).

Jamon Moore

Back in 2018, Eliot McKinley, Cheuk Hei Ho, and I worked on a precursor of sorts to Goals Added and Expected Threat (xT) called Expected Possessions Goals (xPG) -- the bulk of work having been done by Cheuk Hei and Eliot. The first couple of seasons of GameFlows were based on xPG. Om was a regular on a podcast with Gabe Lezra and Evan Mateer called Let's Fix Football. They asked for one of us to come on the show and talk about xPG, and I drew the short straw. In recent years, I've been on dozens of podcasts, but this was actually my very first podcast appearance.

I had no idea what to think, but Om also made it the easiest podcast appearance ever, because, even though there were a lot of expected possession value (xPV or EPV) models coming out at that time, he somehow made this seem like the most important one ever made. He just had that way of lifting up everyone else's work and making it seem so valuable. He would ask you a couple dozen questions because he was genuinely curious.

In that ASA Sophia Smith article, Om used a bit of Where Goals Come From series work in it, and he came to me asking if it was okay to use it -- which, of course, I said "yeah, please do!". Then he just proceeded to ask question after question, because he wanted to understand it as if it was his own. If he used something in his writing, he felt an ownership that came with writing about it. He needed to understand it as well as the original author, if possible.

I never got to meet Om in person, but I've never been so immediately impressed by someone in this space like I was Om. The kind of insatiable curiosity that he had just doesn't come along as often as it should.

Eliot McKinley

I want to add to Jamon’s point that I thought OM was like 40 or something back in 2018 based upon his mastery of things. He was like 19.

Jamon Moore

I had no clue either at the time.

Kieran Doyle

It really speaks to the man that you’ve got so many people across states and countries and the internet and in person who all have a story and a kind word.

Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap it up. One of Om’s parting wishes was a donation fund to the NWSLPA’s Emergency and Charitable Fund, if you want to support further it’s nearly raised $25,000 and can be found at the link below: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-om-arvinds-legacy-in-soccer