These days, the “German Model” of developing exciting young players is being celebrated, among others, at this week’s soccer trade show Soccerex in Manchester. On a panel titled “One Common Goal – the German Model For Success” German Nationa… Read more ›
I ran my previous offensive production model over 5 years of EPL data and the results are displayed in the diagram below. Teams with larger text and bluer color earned more points and smaller text and red color fewer points. The big four end up in the upper right quadrant and the teams with the [...] Read more ›
This is a soccer-centric blog, and I am to keep it that way, but I also know that a lot of basketball analysts read this site. With that in mind I am going to write about something basketball related that draws upon my experience with developing league coefficients for CONCACAF club competitions in soccer. It’s also timely with March Madness — the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament — approaching its conclusion. The overwhelming majority of readers to this site come from the USA, but a significant number are from other parts of the world so a little bit of… Read more ›
Analytics is a piece to the puzzle, not the solution to the puzzle. Soccer / football analytics can help a team gain a competitive advantage whether it is through key insights into tactics, managing to KPIs or identifying and eliminating biases in the decision making process. Understanding the mental side to the game is another [...] Read more ›
In my last post I used binary logistic regression (BLR) to show the impact of various EPL match attributes on the likelihood of winning a match. Soon after beginning the work I thought of another good use for a BLR model – identifying the fa… Read more ›
One key metric in our goal scoring framework is shot quality. In this post we’re going to outline the key components of our measure of shot quality, look at the distribution of shot quality and see how much teams vary on shot quality.Intuit… Read more ›
There has been lots of talk this year that Manchester United aren’t playing the most beautiful or inspiring football, but that they owe their table position instead to playing well week in and week out. Really well, mind you, at least according to some… Read more ›
I re-ran my previous model on the last 5 seasons of EPL data to tweak the parameters a bit and it seems pretty stable. I decided to test it out on this season’s league table. Team Actual Points Estimated Points Difference Man United 63 62 -1 Arsenal 58 60 2 Chelsea 54 57 3 Tottenham [...] Read more ›
38 year old FC Sao Paulo goalkeeper Rogerio Ceni is my hero of the day. He managed to score his 100th goal that helped Sao Paulo win the local derby against Corinthians 2-1 on Sunday. Here’s the goal, in case you haven’t seen it.But what makes thi… Read more ›
Special thanks to Dog Face for the data (he and I will be collaborating on the second post in this series), and to Chris from Soccer By Numbers for help in dissecting the stats.
A little over a month ago I completed a post that quantified the differen… Read more ›
