With all of the caveats over player salaries as published by the MLS Players Union, thanks to these data it’s possible to ask whether MLS front offices have become more efficient in talent selection over time.Since the start of the Designated Player rule in MLS in 2007, teams in the league have seen varying levels […]
Thomas Peeters and Stefan Szymanski, “Financial fair play in European football”, Economic Policy, 29(78): 343-390, 2014. [Citation|Working Paper]Summary: This paper analyzes the financial and sporting impact of the UEFA Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations in four major European football leagues. The authors claim that the effect of the break-even constraint embedded in FFP is to strengthen the […]
Four years ago I wrote a post on inflation-adjusted front-office efficiencies in Major League Soccer. Looking back at the post, I was moving in the right direction with the analysis, but I believe that it’s better to compare seasonal performances instead of averages. In this post I present data for standardized front-office efficiency in the […]
In the previous post I presented the latest version of the Front-Office Efficiency metric. I use that updated metric to revise that infographic that I created for the 2014 Major League Soccer season.The figure looks similar to the previous Front-Office Efficiency infographic with some important differences. Because the offset payroll and performance values have been […]
As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been quiet for much of the month of March. I’ve had some other events going on in my life (new day job, mostly), but I’ve been spending most of my time working on improvements to the Major League Soccer Front-Office Efficiency metric. In particular, I’ve been working on sourcing and […]
Major League Soccer’s 20th season kicks off later tonight, so in advance of the new season I present projections for all twenty teams in the regular season.I thank Aaron Nielsen for his work in creating expected goal statistics for all of the MLS sides and for his permission in allowing me to use these figures […]
The Soccer Analytics panel at the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was not a waste of attendee’s time and I hope that future panels follow this year’s example.On the panel were the following: Michael Niemeyer (analysis coach for first and youth teams, FC Bayern Munich), Angus McNab (Opta Sports/PERFORM Group), Ravi Ramineni (performance analyst […]
The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has always been more of a sports business conference through the years, but since 2010 the conference has had tracks in which presentations on various topics in sports analytics have been presented. This year the Research Paper competition returns to the SSAC, but this time with tracks for publications on Baseball, […]
Later this week, I will attend my fifth MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which encompasses the transition of the conference from a one-day meeting of academics and sport insiders to a two-day cultural event on sports analytics and sports business. I have attended all of the conferences in which there was a dedicated panel […]
The presentation at the OptaPro Analytics Forum has just finished, and now it is time to display the slide deck to the public. You can see the slide deck below, with reformatted slides and an additional results slide.As I said yesterday, the objective of this talk is to present at a high level the objectives and […]
