Below is the final Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 Primeira Liga of Portugal, which concluded yesterday. Standard statements about the Pythagorean table apply. I had wondered if Porto's unbeaten season would "break" the Pythagorean expectation. Looks like it did. But when I compare Porto's record to that of other champion teams, it appears that their […]
A lot of my research and development work revolves around mathematics, and to that end I have a large collection of math books in my personal library. They're focused mostly on applied mathematics, but I have a few on pure mathematics as well (analysis, algebra, topology). However, my library is lacking in one important area […]
Below is the final Pythagorean table for this season's German Bundesliga which concluded today. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. Dortmund were deserved champions, but an underperforming Bayern Munich made the championship more of a blowout than it should have been. Hannover 96, for so long the most overachieving side in Germany (and Europe for […]
A couple of months ago I mentioned that UPenn Wharton had put forward a request for proposals for a ticketing analytics research opportunity with Stubhub. Relationship marketing isn't my main area of work, but the analytics tools for performance analysis and ticketing analysis are similar, so I decided to submit a proposal. I am very pleased […]
Last night I wrote a post on the concept of marginal utility and how it might apply to the goalscoring metric I developed early in the week. Chris Anderson let me know about his post on team leverage and how it related to my notion of marginal utility, which I elaborated upon in a post […]
Last month, Chris Anderson of Soccer by the Numbers wrote an excellent post on the concept of "leverage" in soccer matches, which is defined as the likelihood of winning the match given the score and the time remaining in the game. I hope Chris will forgive me for writing this, but I have to admit […]
Over the last few days I have presented a goalscoring metric that makes the value of the goal a function of the quality of the opponent, for which incoming league position acts as a proxy. The main concept is that a goal scored against a top team should count for more than three or four […]
I just found out about this conference and thought that I should publicize it here, although it is very early. In a year and three days from now the Third World Conference on Science and Soccer will take place in Ghent, Belgium. This conference is a spinoff of the World Congress of Science and Football, […]
The 7th World Congress on Science and Football starts two weeks from today in Nagoya, and the final preparations for the conference are approaching completion. You can read the final conference program here. There are extensive paper and poster presentation sessions over the four days of the conference over a wide range of subject areas […]
In the previous posts on the weighted goalscoring metric, I used a logistic function to describe the weight that I apply to goals scored against opponents based on their current rank in the league table. The idea is that league position is a proxy for opponent strength, which isn't perfect, of course, but is something […]
