Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, Crown Archetype, 2011. [Amazon link]"Defense wins championships". "In the zone". "Swallowing the whistle". "Icing the kicker (or shooter)". These and other sports clichés are common in the modern lexicon of fans, writers, players, and decision-makers. […]
We've decided on a location for the meetup of soccer analysts attending the SSAC later this week. It will be at MJ O'Connor's, which is an Irish-styled pub in the lobby of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The Westin is attached to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and is within walking distance of the […]
The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is a week away, and I've been looking at the list of research paper presentations and posters. All of the presentations pertain to the Big Four sports leagues in North America, with the slight exception of the paper on ticket-buying decisions by fans. If I had to draw a theme […]
Staying with Sarah's site for another post, as she has posted her thoughts on the problem of data quality in football. All this is motivated by the controversial goal scored by David Villa of Barcelona, and the different offside pictures of the same event published by four Spanish media outlets. Her post also dovetails with […]
Sarah Rudd at On Footy proposed in email conversation with me about having a meetup of those soccer analytics people who are attending next week's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which I think is a really good idea. The plan is to have it on Friday night (4 March) at some establishment in Boston where people […]
A. Heuer, C. Müller, O. Rubner, "Soccer: Is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian process?", Europhysics Letters, 89 (3): 38007, 2010. [arXiv]Does there exist a formula that can predict the score of a soccer match between two teams? The answer's not that simple, but three physics researchers from Germany have used German league data from the […]
I was not aware of this course until I saw it mentioned on Ben Alamar’s Twitter feed, but there is a course at Georgia Tech – my undergraduate alma mater – on sports analytics. The scope of the course is wide-ranging and covers theory, development, and applications of analytics for in-game planning, team/player performance, business […]
It was inevitable that Opta would seek to establish themselves in the American soccer market as match data providers. There is an ad at the Major League Soccer website seeking live match analysts for the upcoming season. It's a part-time job and applicants must live within commuting distance of Opta's NYC offices.Here's a video that […]
There have been changes to the lineup for the Soccer Analytics forum at this year's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Landon Donovan and Sunil Gulati are no longer listed as panelists, but there are some other participants: Bruno Aziza (Microsoft) Gavin Flieg (Manchester City) Steven Houston (Chelsea) Blake Wooster (Prozone) Ian Graham (Decision Technology, University of […]
My post in response to the Brian Phillips article in Slate touched a little on the issues of open source versus proprietary approaches to soccer analytics, but this blog post at Hot Time in Old Town (a Chicago Fire fan’s site) has motivated me to write more at length on the subject. It’s something that […]
