I am back in my hotel room after a long but very productive first day of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Soccer was not the theme of the day today, and I saw only bits and pieces of some sessions. There was the opening session on developing modern athletes in 10,000 hours (chaired by […]
I'm in Boston now and getting settled in my hotel. I'm genuinely excited about the conference and all of the new things planned!Tomorrow is going to be a long and busy day. I'm going to sit in on a few sessions during the day, and there are a couple of research papers and an EOS […]
My bags are packed, and I'm about to complete some final chores before I go to bed. Tomorrow I fly to Boston for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I'm excited about the additional sessions and other features of the conference, and I look forward to networking with other sports analytics people (not just soccer) […]
It's the week of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, so perhaps it's a good time to look up and down my blogroll and write about the soccer analytics work that other people are doing. I think the last time I did this was during the World Cup; I might make this a semi-regular feature […]
Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, Crown Archetype, 2011. [Amazon link]"Defense wins championships". "In the zone". "Swallowing the whistle". "Icing the kicker (or shooter)". These and other sports clichés are common in the modern lexicon of fans, writers, players, and decision-makers. […]
We've decided on a location for the meetup of soccer analysts attending the SSAC later this week. It will be at MJ O'Connor's, which is an Irish-styled pub in the lobby of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The Westin is attached to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and is within walking distance of the […]
The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is a week away, and I've been looking at the list of research paper presentations and posters. All of the presentations pertain to the Big Four sports leagues in North America, with the slight exception of the paper on ticket-buying decisions by fans. If I had to draw a theme […]
Staying with Sarah's site for another post, as she has posted her thoughts on the problem of data quality in football. All this is motivated by the controversial goal scored by David Villa of Barcelona, and the different offside pictures of the same event published by four Spanish media outlets. Her post also dovetails with […]
Sarah Rudd at On Footy proposed in email conversation with me about having a meetup of those soccer analytics people who are attending next week's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which I think is a really good idea. The plan is to have it on Friday night (4 March) at some establishment in Boston where people […]
A. Heuer, C. Müller, O. Rubner, "Soccer: Is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian process?", Europhysics Letters, 89 (3): 38007, 2010. [arXiv]Does there exist a formula that can predict the score of a soccer match between two teams? The answer's not that simple, but three physics researchers from Germany have used German league data from the […]
