Knowing when the ball is out of play (“ball-out” events) in football is important in order to calculate effective playing time and the possession metrics of the two teams. But what do you do when you don’t have ball-out data? In this post I present a calibration tool to estimate match time lost due to […]
I’ve been banging on the “Hey, let’s model effective match time!” drum for a few posts now, and I’m ready to move on to something else, but I want to present one more extension. You can read some of my previous work in the Match Quality Metrics category of the blog.I want to answer this […]
In my previous post on the subject I applied the mean centering technique to the regression that I ran on effective time data in the 2010-11 English Premier League. I’ve been working with J-League data from this recently concluded season, so let’s refine that analysis for completeness sake.If you’re just joining us, the regression analysis […]
First of all, Happy New Year to all our readers! I wish you all a productive, healthy, and happy 2014.I want to continue some work that I was working on last year — 24 hours ago, in fact. In my previous post I conducted a regression analysis of team effects on the amount of time […]
Six months ago I brought up the idea of effective time in football and developed an algorithm to calculate it from a technical/tactical data set (aka touch-by-touch data created by companies such as Opta Sports). It’s not a novel concept — RAI would display such a statistic during their Serie A broadcasts in the […]
I’ve been performing some descriptive analysis of the effective playing time in J-League Division One (J1) and Division Two (J2) at the mid-season and end-of-season points. On average, the typical J1 match has about three minutes more playing time than a match in J2, and the effective time in the top flight is comparable to […]
Back in July I wrote about the variations in effective match time in Divisions 1 and 2 of the J-League — the professional leagues of Japanese club football. The J-League has taken a keen interest in measuring effective time as part of their Plus Quality initiative to identify and minimize those events in a football […]
Since last season the J-League has been publishing — through its data partner Datastadium — actual playing time statistics for every match in Divisions 1 and 2. It’s part of a new initiative called +Quality (Plus Quality) which aims to improve the spectacle of matches for spectators by minimizing the events that annoy them, like […]
I see that my posts on match tempo have attracted a lot of attention and comments. Some of them disagree with my approach and/or ask some interesting questions. I don’t have a problem with that — the existence of critical comments indicates that people care enough about what your work to pose them.One comment asked […]
A few weeks ago I wrote my thoughts on match tempo as it is currently defined in soccer. Essentially, the possessions per team metric, one borrowed from basketball, runs into some limitations when applied to football or other invasion sports conducted over a large playing area. This opinion is not a knock on other analysts […]
