Analytics work in soccer has tended to focus on the performance of teams and players, but it is inevitable that attention would turn to match referees. Assessment of referee performance — especially concerning specific referees — is extremely important not only to the leagues and the teams, but also (let's admit this) to gambling interests. […]
Football managers have few opportunities to directly influence a match — the starting lineup, the halftime team talk, and the substitutions available to him. Substitutions can be made for tactical reasons, or they can be forced through injury. If you consider only substitutions that are made for strategic reasons, when is the best time to […]
I was looking around for some open-source math software today, and stumbled across two packages that I want to share with those of you (both of you??) who might be interested.The first is a software tool called CVXMOD. It is a Python-based tool for setting up and solving convex optimization problems, and was developed by […]
I decided to update the Soccer Analytics blog with one important addition: Climbing the Ladder. Why I did not add this blog any sooner is beyond me, but I apologize (after all, he has a link to me!). If you have a blog that deals with some aspect of soccer analytics and you'd like a link, […]
It's taken a while to get a website set up for my business, which is just as well. I didn't want to get people's hopes up without making significant progress on the technical side of this venture. I'm happy to report that I've set up a company website. It's purely informational and doesn't have a […]
Eric Vormelker hijacked my celebratory post with an article from Brian Phillips in Slate that questioned the move toward analytics in soccer. (Quite all right, Eric!) The article hits on points that I’ve made in previous posts on soccer analytics. Being self-referential in blog posts is bad form, so I’ll just point you to the […]
Last night (actually early this morning) on my Twitter feed I intimated that there would be some big news forthcoming on this site. Now that I've gotten some sleep, I can reveal it to you. I learned last night that my paper on the soccer Pythagorean estimation will appear in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in […]
We complete the mid-season Pythagorean tables for the Big 5 European leagues with the table for the 2010-11 English Premier League season, matches played up to 16 January 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. The Wikipedia page for the EPL has correct data for a change, so hurray for that!The table is remarkable in […]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 Italian Serie A season, for matches played up to 15 January 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. I use points earned on the field of play, so Bologna's point deductions are not taken into account. The table indicates that Roma are the big overachieving side over […]
Yes, I know that it's late, but I can't sleep.Several months ago, I wrote a few posts on various mathematical tools that might be of use to those doing more rigorous methods of soccer analytics. I came across a really nice tutorial paper on convex optimization written by Haitham Hindi, a scientist at PARC (Palo […]
