Category Archives: Paper Discussions

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Statistical analysts and professional sports teams: a view from Bill Gerrard

I start off 2012 with a look at an article from 2011 — this piece in the Royal Statistical Society’s Getstats campaign by Leeds University professor Bill Gerrard on his experiences as a statistical analyst with professional baseball, soccer, and rugby teams. Gerrard had famously partnered with Billy Beane on some analytics work with the Oakland A’s ownership group but has since transitioned to rugby and cricket. It’s worth reading in order to appreciate better his role in the team and the challenges involved in integrating statistical performance analysis in a professional sports team. Some of the lessons learned are… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
Bill Gerrard, High-Level Discussions, Moneyball, Oakland A's, Paper Discussions, San Jose Earthquakes, Saracens

A survey of referees’ physiological and technical performance

Weston, M. et. al. (2006) "The effect of match standard and referee experience upon the objective and subjective match workload of English Premier League referees", Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 9 (3): 256-262. [Citation|PDF] Mallo, J. et al. (2009) "Physical demands of top-class soccer assistant refereeing during high-standard matches", International Journal of Sports Medicine, 30 (5): 331-336. [Citation|PDF] Weston, M. et. al. (2010) "Ageing and physical match performance in English Premier League soccer referees", Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 13 (1): 96-100. [Citation|PDF] Weston, M. et. al. (2011) "Variability of Soccer Referees’ Match Performances", International Journal… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
football, Paper Discussions, Prozone, referee analytics, Referee Performance

Implementing a Moneyball approach in complex team sports

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 ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
Bill Gerrard, Billy Beane, complex invasion team sports, High-Level Discussions, Moneyball, Paper Discussions, soccermetrics

Club/player contracts: Another application of options pricing theory

P. Antonioni and J. Cubbin, "The Bosman Ruling and the emergence of a single market in soccer talent", European Journal of Law and Economics, 9(2): 157-73, 2000. This paper discusses the effect of the Bosman Ruling on the nature of contracts between club and player under the modeling framework of options pricing theory. It uses the framework to formulate club strategies in contract negotiations in the post-Bosman landscape. (It’s worth asking if the findings continue to hold in 2011.) Review after the jump. ——– The Bosman ruling in 1995 marked the beginning of the free-agent era in European football and… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
City University of London, football transfers, investment theory, John Cubbin, Markov Processes, options theory, Paper Discussions, Peter Antonioni, Player Valuation Models, soccermetrics

Effect of manager turnover on team performance

ter Weel, B., "Does Manager Turnover Improve Firm Performance? Evidence from Dutch Soccer, 1996-2004", De Economist, 2001, to appear. [Link] Heuer A, Müller C, Rubner O, Hagemann N, Strauss B "Usefulness of Dismissing and Changing the Coach in Professional Soccer", PLoS ONE, 6(3): e17664, 2011. [Link] These two papers examine the impact of manager turnover on club performance — ter Weel studies the Dutch Eredivisie, while Heuer et al. focus on the German Bundesliga. This kind of study has applicability to research on manager performance and firm outcomes, but sports data are more readily available and observable than business data…. Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
Paper Discussions, Team Performance

Application of the weighted goals metric to Holland

The ideas of goal weighting and goal utility have attracted attention from many quarters in the soccer analytics community. One example is the excellent 11tegen11 blog which presents an implementation of the weighted goals metric to the Dutch Eredivisie. A couple differences between his metric and mine are that he uses the idea of "expected points" as a proxy for opposition quality and that he incorporates in-match result probabilities into his goal value calculations. I have objections to using the raw odds from betting houses as they are a function of both the result probability and the vigorish, but I… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
goal weighting, Paper Discussions, soccermetrics

Fair referee assignments in football

Yavuz, M., Inan, U.H., Figlali, A. "Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues", Computers and Operations Research, 35: 2937-2951, 2008. [Citation] [From the abstract] Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and analysis of the problem for fair referee assignments, and develops a constructive heuristic and a local search procedure for its solution. Results from an extensive computational study show that the methods are effective in solving the problem in a second of computation time and yielding… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
combinatorial optimization, Mesut Yavuz, metaheuristics, Paper Discussions, referee assignment, Referee Performance, Tournament Design

Sports scheduling and the traveling tournament problem

K. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approach", E. Burke and P. Causmaeher (eds.), Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science 2740, 63-77, (2004). [PDF] The traveling tournament problem asks if there exists a competition schedule that allows teams in a league to play each other twice while minimizing travel distance. This paper discusses algorithms that address this deceptively complex problem and presents a new solution for an eight-team league. ————– Most domestic soccer competitions (and Champions League group stages) use the double round-robin format, and for most leagues, it… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
double round-robin tournaments, George Nemhauser, Kelly Easton, Michael Trick, Paper Discussions, Tournament Design, traveling salesman problem, traveling tournament problem