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 […]
Continuing with the results that I had presented last night on the weighted goalscorers of this season's La Liga, here — for your edification and amusement — are the top goalscorers for each of the 20 Primera División teams: Player Team Goals Weighted José Ulloa Almería 7 4.586 Fernando Llorente Athletic 17 10.284 Sergio Agüero […]
I was very encouraged by the reception that my weighted goalscorers metric has received, so I went to work on applying the metric to a league competition. It is not a trivial task at all, especially when you are building a table of league fixtures and goalscorers and organizing them by matchdays. But after about […]
I have been doing work on in-match metrics relevant to soccer, but lately I have been looking for ways to extract information, however imperfect, from the limited amount of data that we obtain from a match. Goran of the Waiting for the Equalizer blog came up with a goalkeeper metric that weighted goals allowed by […]
A couple of days ago I was invited to speak at the upcoming Sports Management Conference at Florida State University, and I am pleased to announce that I have accepted the invitation. I have not settled on a topic, but it will have something to do with the state of soccer analytics and its potential […]
