Last night (actually early this morning) on my Twitter feed I intimated that there would be some big news forthcoming on this site. Now that I've gotten some sleep, I can reveal it to you. I learned last night that my paper on the soccer Pythagorean estimation will appear in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in […]
We complete the mid-season Pythagorean tables for the Big 5 European leagues with the table for the 2010-11 English Premier League season, matches played up to 16 January 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. The Wikipedia page for the EPL has correct data for a change, so hurray for that!The table is remarkable in […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 Italian Serie A season, for matches played up to 15 January 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. I use points earned on the field of play, so Bologna's point deductions are not taken into account. The table indicates that Roma are the big overachieving side over […]
Yes, I know that it's late, but I can't sleep.Several months ago, I wrote a few posts on various mathematical tools that might be of use to those doing more rigorous methods of soccer analytics. I came across a really nice tutorial paper on convex optimization written by Haitham Hindi, a scientist at PARC (Palo […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 French Ligue 1 at just past the halfway mark of the season (matches played up to 15 January). The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70.When I was taking a look at the goal distributions for each of the teams, I was half-expecting Rennes to be the big overachiever […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 German 1. Bundesliga, for matches played up to 15 January 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. Dortmund are flying high at the top of the league, but the team of the first half of the season — and perhaps the biggest surprise in the major European […]
And now it's time to talk about the error-ridden Wikipedia page for the Championship. I use the results matrix to develop league tables from which I develop a Pythagorean table. I match up the league table against the table on the Wikipedia site to verify that all of the data line up correctly (sort of […]
Fulfilling a reader request…Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 English Football League Championship, as of matches played last Saturday (15 January 2011). As always, I used a league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70. The projections suggest that QPR should be opening up a substantial lead on their rivals, but they haven't. The rest of […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 Spanish Primera División after 19 matches — exactly at the halfway point. As always, I use a league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70 in my calculations. Barcelona and Real Madrid have made the league an emphatic two-horse race, and that is reflected in the Pythagorean expectations. Espanyol was […]
Two years ago I started Soccermetrics in order to write about statistical problems in soccer in a more technical and uninhibited way. My initial post was one that I had written on my HexagonalBlog website as a way to answer some questions in my mind about the viability of an analytical approach to soccer. Now […]
