Twitter name change
AdministrativaI have changed my Twitter username to @soccermetrics. Please direct all future follows there.@socmetrics now belongs to SocMetrics.com, a social media startup.
Soccer Pythagorean paper now published in JQAS
Soccer Pythagorean: Theory, Soccermetrics Publications, Vanity AlertIt's taken a very long time to get to this point, but my paper on the Soccer Pythagorean has been published in the recent edition of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. You can find a link to the paper here. Thanks to all who helped bring this about, and it is my hope and […]
Math Toolbox: Information on Bayesian statistics
Math ToolboxBayesian statistics is a branch of statistics that I have been studying recently because of the framework it provides for updating probabilities and statistical distributions with incoming data. It could prove useful to some statistical models that I am developing and will develop in the future. I've been looking for books and online material on […]
CONCACAF Club/League Coefficients: 2011-04-27 version
Club/League CoefficientsThe 2010-11 CONCACAF Champions League is now over, and it is time to publish the final set of club and country coefficients. For those new to the site and unaware of how the coefficients work, here is an explanation of my methodology. These are coefficients calculated over the last five seasons, inclusive.First, here is the […]
Maybe goalscoring is Poisson
Goalscoring ModelsI see that Chris Anderson has been having fun with nice-looking scatter plots lately, so why let him have all that to himself?I've had my doubts that you could describe goal distributions as Poisson, at least when it comes to deriving derivative expressions from them. A formulation of the soccer Pythagorean doesn't work with a […]
MLS beta-tests its Opta-enhanced website
Match Data CollectionMajor League Soccer is beta-testing its new website which is to be enhanced with in-match data from Opta Sports. There are more data presented than before, but consider me decidedly underwhelmed by the total package. First of all, there are no data that indicate where, specifically, on the field a match event occurred. It is true […]
Fair referee assignments in football
Paper Discussions, Referee Performance, Tournament DesignYavuz, M., Inan, U.H., Figlali, A. "Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues", Computers and Operations Research, 35: 2937-2951, 2008. [Citation][From the abstract] Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and analysis […]
Mailing address removed
AdministrativaI closed my Post Office box today, so I've removed my mailing address from the site. I wasn't receiving items often enough to justify spending the money for it. From time to time I receive offers from publishers or other people to send me books and other soccer-related items; if you wish to send me […]
More on sports scheduling
Tournament DesignTo continue the previous post, if you are interested in sports scheduling, there are a number of sites that you could visit. First, Michael Trick's website is a treasure trove of information on sports scheduling and the optimization algorithms that are used to solve them. I highly recommend reading the survey papers on round-robin scheduling and […]
Sports scheduling and the traveling tournament problem
Paper Discussions, Tournament DesignK. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approach", E. Burke and P. Causmaeher (eds.), Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science 2740, 63-77, (2004). [PDF]The traveling tournament problem asks if there exists a competition schedule that allows teams in a league to play each other […]