Below is the Pythagorean table for France's Ligue 1, through the tenth round of the 2010-11 season. Standard statements apply. Bordeaux and Caen were tied on points, goal difference, and goals scored, so I'm not exactly sure if the league position is correct. (From what I've read about the league format in France, those two […]
Over the following seven days I will publish Pythagorean tables for the Big Five European leagues, and perhaps Brazil and Japan if there's interest. I start with the English Premier League, through round nine of the season. Wigan Athletic look to be repeating their escape act of last season, but will it last this time? […]
Hopefully, this will be the last post I write on the Soccer Pythagorean. Oh, I will continue to post tables for selected European leagues and MLS throughout the season, but development of the estimation formula has reached a level of maturity where I can now direct my focus to other things. (more…)
This blog gets a fair amount of traffic from the basketball analytics community, and I thank them for that. I have a few questions for them, and they're motivated by the upcoming MLS playoffs and by previous work on the two-leg playoff series, which is the most widely used playoff format in soccer. Has there […]
Dave Clark at Sounder at Heart has written a post that takes the Win Expectancy charts from Graham MacAree's We Ain't Got no History site and applies them to last night's Colorado-Real Salt Lake match last night. (For those of you who don't follow MLS, Colorado had a 2-0 lead late in the match, then […]
The 2010 MLS regular season has just concluded, so now I can publish the final Pythagorean tables. I'm using the usual league Pythagorean exponent (1.70), but this time I am using a single table. It doesn't change the results, of course, but some people like the single table in MLS and the balanced schedule facilitates […]
While I was writing my previous post on goalscoring variances and Pythagorean estimation, I wanted to know if there were some kind of relation between goalscoring variances and the average number of league points taken per game. So I extracted variance data, league points (which I then divided by matches played to get an average […]
There is one remaining study to complete with respect to the Pythagorean estimation before I wrap a bow around it and concentrate on something else. Last weekend in San Francisco I touched briefly on the effect of offensive/defensive goal variances on the difference between the Pythagorean estimate and the actual point total — the Pythagorean […]
A chance to test a new display format for my tables, and also whet people's stat appetites for the 2010 release on Sunday. League Table Pythagorean Team GP W D L GF GA GD Pts W D L Pts Δ Columbus Crew 30 13 10 7 41 31 +10 49 13 8 9 47 […]
Most people would answer "yes" to the above question, but as this article in the British Plus magazine indicates, the answer is not as apparent as it seems. In fact, there is a substantial amount of uncertainty as far as the true underlying quality of the team is concerned. The article is a couple of […]
