Speaker Profile

Ryan O’Hanlon is the author of Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution, published in 2022 by Abrams Press. Chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 books to read during the World Cup and described by The New Republic as “an extraordinary account of how soccer actually works”, Net Gains is an in-depth examination of soccer’s fledgling Moneyball movement: Why do we know so little about what matters in the world’s most popular sport? Who’s trying to change that? And how much of it is ultimately just, well, unknowable?

O’Hanlon is also a staff writer at ESPN, where he covers European soccer and the United States Men’s National Team from an analytics-adjacent perspective. Before ESPN, he published the newsletter No Grass in the Clouds and hosted the podcast Infinite Football. Before that, he was an editor at The Ringer and Grantland and one of the hosts of the podcast Ringer FC. His writing has also appeared in FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times, and GQ, among other publications.