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 […]
Three months ago I wrote an article on the goalscoring characteristics of champion and relegated teams, and showed that champion clubs in general have very tight and consistent defenses. In particular, the goals allowed variance — the spread of the individual numbers about the average goals allowed — tends to be less than 1.0 for […]
Below is the final Pythagorean table for the 2011 Major League Soccer season which concluded this evening. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70, and draw and loss columns are in reverse order from the American sports table format.The LA Galaxy raised their performance in the final third of the season and narrowly missed becoming the […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2011-12 English Premier League season, for matches played up to 16 October 2011. The standard league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70 is used.You can see the same amount of separation between the Manchester clubs and the main challengers as we close on the quarter-mark of the season. It looks […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2011-12 French Ligue 1 season, for matches played up to 16 October 2011. The standard league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70 is used.The top five in the league appear to be playing a bit better than expected, if their goal statistics were anything to go by. Toulouse are also […]
