I've blogged on a couple of occasions about the issue of in-match data in soccer that is collected by sports data companies and considered proprietary information. It presents a complication in soccer analytics because of the traditional lack of statistics surrounding the game. American sports have more historical team and player data of individual matches than […]
Last month, Ben Alamar, who founded the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports eight years ago, announced that he would be transferring the editorship of the journal to Jim Albert, professor of mathematics and statistics at Bowling Green State University. Ben started the journal at a time when the field of sport statistics was in […]
Continuing my look at the finances and on-field results of Major League Soccer, I expand my earlier financial determinism study to the period between 2007 and 2011. This period covers the entire Designated Player era. (more…)
I was looking for other publications that explored the connection between payroll and performance in other American team sports, and came across this interesting series of articles by ESPN's Patrick Hruby published at the beginning of the year on front-office efficiency in American sports leagues. He covers the Big Four sports leagues as well as […]
On the Leaders in Performance website there is a retrospective on the conference by two British sport researchers – one the associate director of the Sport Sciences program at Liverpool John Moores University, the other a sport psychologist (and faculty member at the same university). It covers some of the sessions that I didn't attend, […]
Now that the 2011 MLS Cup Playoffs are in full swing, I've taken a look back at the just-completed regular season with a post on the relationship between payroll and league performance and another on the marginal payroll cost per point won in the league. In this post, I'll expand the marginal payroll cost study […]
Following on from my previous post on the relationship between Major League Soccer payrolls and on-field performance, I consider how efficient league teams have been in the 2011 regular season. I seek to answer the question, What is an MLS team's cost per point relative to the league average? (more…)
One of the theses of Kuper and Szymanski's book Soccernomics is that team performance in a football league is strongly determined by its payroll; in other words, clubs with highest payrolls finish at the top of the league more often than not. I've seen publications that state the correlation coefficient between payroll and points in […]
Last week, tickets went on sale for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and I am pleased to announce that I will be there in early March of next year. The conference continues its exponential growth as it moves from the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to the more centrally-located Hynes Convention Center. Conference tickets […]
I was in a discussion on Twitter with some people on the various sports analytics conferences that are either focused on soccer or have soccer-related forums. One such conference is the Science and Football conference in the UK, which had its inaugural meeting last year. The second edition of the conference has been confirmed for […]
