My talk entitled "Entrepreneurship and Soccer Analytics" that I gave at Florida State’s Sports Management Conference is now available here as a PDF. It will also be available on the public FTP site of Soccermetrics Research & Consulting in the Presentations folder. My thanks to Dr. Ryan Rodenberg for extending the invitation to present. It was a pleasure to interact with the other speakers, conference attendees, and Seminole soccer coaching staff. Read more ›
The blog has been quiet for a few days, and for a reason. I´ve been busy working on a little side project. Before too long, I´ll tell you more about that, but one of the things that have come of out of it has been a more detailed look at various perf… Read more ›
The following guest post is from Andres G. Abad, Ph. D of the Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL), Ecuador.
Introduction
Soccer, just like any other interesting game, is a game of possibilities. More specifically, it is a gam… Read more ›
It’s been nearly a month-and-a-half since I last posted to this, my own blog. It’s not for lack of analysis and writing, but more that the writing and analysis has been concentrated on the Transfer Price Index (TPI) and their blog and competing with m… Read more ›
On Friday I will give a presentation at the 13th Sports Management Conference hosted by Florida State University’s Sports Management program. My talk is entitled "Entrepreneurship and Soccer Analytics", which isn’t the best title that I could come up with but nevertheless covers the scope of my presentation. I will talk about the motivation for analytics in soccer, discuss the challenges to developing successful and meaningful analytics, and present my view of the current state-of-the-art and future directions. Throughout the presentation I will talk about my motivations for starting my company and the lessons that I am learning along the… Read more ›
With the second week of fixtures in the Group Stages of the Champions League about to begin, we thought it would be interesting to look at how the structure of the competition affects the percentage chance each team has of … Continue reading → Read more ›
This weekend I had the privilege of speaking at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports. It is a much more technical conference than the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference so I felt a bit like a duck out of water given my background in computer science and not hardcore statistical methods (and these guys [...] Read more ›
This afternoon I watched Moneyball at a theater in midtown Atlanta. I was looking forward to watching the movie not just because I had read the book, but also because I lived in the Bay Area during 2001-02 when the Oakland A’s were one of the best teams in Major League Baseball. So I remember the criticism that Beane weathered in the early part of the season, the growing excitement as the team embarked on their American League-record winning streak, and the crushing disappointment (and recriminations by the baseball establishment) when the Minnesota Twins defeated the A’s in the AL… Read more ›
There’s clearly more of an emphasis in sport on winning than there is on entertaining, but we can turn our football modelling techniques towards a different target: goals per game. What you really want is for your team to be … Continue reading → Read more ›
B. Gerrard, "Is the Moneyball Approach Transferable to Complex Invasion Team Sports?", International Journal of Sport Finance, 2: 214-230, 2007. [Citation] This paper analyzes reasons for the success of Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics as described in the best-seller Moneyball using a benchmarking technique and investigates the development of a knowledge-based strategy in conjunction with systematic analysis of player performance data. The study goes on to ask whether such a strategy could be effective in invasion team sports like soccer which have low degrees of separability between team and player performance. A hierarchical structural model is developed to analyze player… Read more ›
