Category Archives: soccermetrics

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Entrepreneurship and Soccer Analytics

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 ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
Conferences and Symposia, Florida State University, soccer analytics, soccermetrics, Soccermetrics LLC, Soccermetrics Publications, Sports Management Conference, Vanity Alert

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

The evolution of possession analysis in soccer

At the Dutch football site 11tegen11 (11 on 11) there is an extended discussion on possession analysis in football and its evolution over the years. The motivating principle is a simple one — if you don’t have the ball you can’t score, to paraphrase Johan Cruyff. But assessing the likelihood of scoring goals and winning matches from possession is not an easy problem to solve. Initial analysis looked at possession time, but it’s become clear from looking at the data that there is little correlation between time on the ball and match outcome. The alternative process that the author defines… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
High-Level Discussions, possession analysis, soccermetrics

Which Goals Matter? The High Value of Transition Play in the Premier League

While some goals are certainly more beautiful than others, do some actually matter more than others? I’ve been trying get a bead on this question in part by comparing the relative value of goals created in different ways. My earlier analysis of&nb… Read more ›

AuthorChris Anderson
Categories
2010-11 season, English Premier League, EPL, goal creation, goal types, goals, Guardian newspaper, Opta, shots on goal, shots on target, soccermetrics, Statistics

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

Welcome to RedCafe visitors (and others!)

I noticed an uptick in my visitor logs from the Red Cafe website, which is a forum for Manchester United supporters. This is the post that drew in today’s visits, and here is another post on the forum (that one by Rational Football’s "letranger0") that referenced this site. To all of you visiting, welcome! And perhaps now is a good time to provide a link to two posts I wrote that sought to think out loud about soccer analytics and respond to my own doubts about their usefulness: My original Moneyball and Soccer post, and a follow-up to that post… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
Billy Beane, Brad Pitt, Misc Stuff, Moneyball, Oakland A's, soccermetrics, Vanity Alert

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

Announcement on Football Match Result Database work forthcoming

There are new visitors to this website all the time, so not everyone is aware of my ongoing projects, but I have been quiet about this particular project for quite some time. I have been working on the design of a match result database to facilitate my analysis work. I am very allergic to repetitive tasks, and wanted to develop a database that would contain the data I needed and would be in a format that would integrate well with my growing suite of analysis tools. I didn’t find any designs on the net that satisfied me, so I designed… Read more ›

AuthorHoward Hamilton
Categories
football match result database, Soccer Database Development, soccermetrics, Soccermetrics LLC, software development

The Uselessness of Free Kicks in the Premier League

If you’ve been reading this blog these last few weeks, you know that I’ve been spending way too much time digging through data on shot creation in the Premier League with the help of the Opta/Guardian chalkboards. But I can’t quite help myself, so… Read more ›

AuthorChris Anderson
Categories
2010-11 season, English Premier League, EPL, free kicks, Guardian newspaper, Opta, shot creation, shot types, shots, shots on goal, shots on target, soccermetrics, Statistics