The 2018 CONMEBOL Copa Libertadores has reached its semifinal stage featuring traditional powers from the two biggest football countries in South America. River Plate will host defending champions Grêmio in the first leg of the first semifinal on Tuesday night; Boca Juniors will open the second semifinal at home to Palmeiras on Wednesday. Even though […]
J. Apesteguia and I. Palacios-Huerta, “Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment”, American Economic Review 100 (December 2010): 2548-2564.This economics paper focuses on the psychological issues involved in high-stakes competitive environments, using the penalty kick shootout as an illustration. The major finding of the paper is that there is a structural […]
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 […]
Lionel Page and Katie Page, "The second leg home advantage: Evidence from European football cup competitions", Journal of Sports Sciences, 25(14): 1547-1556, 2007. [Scribd]Following up on my discussions of the two-leg competition in football is a very interesting and thorough paper written by British and Australian researchers. I came across it while reading a Wikipedia […]
In my last post on the two-leg format in soccer (MLS Cup Playoffs vs. UEFA Champions League), I determined that in a typical two-leg series, the club hosting the second leg has a 60% chance of winning (3:2 on in betting parlance). I was wondering if that probability held up during each elimination round in […]
Before the Christmas/New Year's break, I published a post at my HexagonalBlog site that ran through the numbers for the two-leg format in the first round of the MLS playoffs. The format has come under some criticism since its introduction in the 2003 season, especially for having the higher seed team host the second leg […]
Benoit Emonet, "Revisiting Statistical Applications in Soccer", STS Report, Department of Mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 2000. [PDF] (more…)
