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Racing Club: Champions on the Field and in the Data

Racing Club are the new champions of the Argentine Superliga, and have returned to the summit after winning the Primera División four years ago. Like outgoing champions Boca Juniors, Racing were never headed in the league table after the very early rounds. Unlike Boca, they faced a challenger who applied increasing amounts of pressure until […]

2018 Copa Libertadores Review: River and Boca close one era and start another

It’s now 2019 and the opening stages of the 2019 Copa Libertadores start in three weeks, but let’s take a look back at the 2018 competition, which didn’t end that long ago. It started with 47 teams, developed into a two-country race, and ended in a mouthwatering and compelling but ultimately depressing and farcical Superclásico […]

Superliga Argentina at one-third distance: Racing to the top

Argentina’s Superliga competition enters the October international break at one-third distance, with a fair number of matches pending due to weather or lack of groundskeeping.  Here is the league table after the most recent matchday:For the first time in almost two years, there is a new leader of the top flight in Argentina. Boca Juniors […]

Centrality at the 2018 FIFA World Cup: Kroos, Xhaka, and Son top the list

Passing network analysis has become part of the standard output in advanced soccer analytics. In this post, I show which players were most influential to their national team’s passing networks at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.During the World Cup I posted passing networks for most matches, and almost all of the knockout phase matches. If […]

Superliga 17/18 Review: Lautaro Martínez, the most dangerous striker

Continuing my postseason analysis of Argentina’s Superliga, I examine the performance of the players up front.Argentina has always been known for its conveyor belt of attacking and creating talent. That talent appears to leave for Europe at younger ages these days, to the extent that the best strikers in the domestic league are either journeymen […]

Superliga 2017/18 Review: Franco Armani, the pick of the goalkeepers

Jorge Sampaoli, manager of Argentina’s national team, announced his preliminary squad list for the 2018 FIFA World Cup earlier this week.  The fact that no fewer than seven players currently in Superliga were in the group of 35 raised more than a few eyebrows, but few were more surprising than River Plate’s Franco Armani.Armani joined […]

Revisiting Expected Goalkeeper Metrics in Argentina Primera 2016-17

In my most recent post, I presented some technical adjustments to my Expected Saves model which resulted in much more interesting (and meaningful) results than the previous version. Last August I used the previous version of the model to evaluate goalkeeper performance in last season’s Primera División. I’m anxious to see how the findings change […]

Goalkeeper Expected Saves in Superliga 2017/18

Last August, I wrote something about my expected saves model and used it to assess goalkeeper performance in Argentina’s Primera División.  To be honest, I was deeply unsatisfied with the model.  It yielded a very optimistic expectation of saves made and as a result the expected goals allowed was extremely low.  Every goalkeeper in the list […]