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Penalty kick shootouts and the importance of shooting first

Hybrid Competitions, Knockout Competitions, Paper Discussions

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 […]

A demographic analysis of MLS players

Paper Discussions, Player Performance

Nathaniel Boyden and James Carey, "From One-and-Done to Seasoned Veterans: A Demographic Analysis of Individual Career Length in Major League Soccer", Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 6(4): Article 5, 2010.In this publication, the authors analyze data on over 1,000 Major League Soccer players in order to study the demographics of the league.  The findings […]

Two papers on the agenda

Paper Discussions

The soccer Pythagorean work never stops, does it?  I was invited to submit an article to the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports based on the poster that I presented at NCSSORS in October, which I wasn't expecting to be honest.  (I thought that journal submissions would be reserved for those who gave oral presentations.)  […]

How do you spot a dive?

Paper Discussions

Another article that I found courtesy of Zonal Marking's Twitter feed — the maiden post from a blog called Mindgames that seeks to apply knowledge of sport psychology to English Premier League soccer.  This post discusses an academic paper on diving in football — how to spot it, behaviors associated with it, motivations for doing […]

Quantifying individual performance in team events

Paper Discussions, Player Performance

Jordi Duch, Joshua S. Waitzmann, Luís A. Nunes Amaral, "Quantifying the Performance of Individual Players in a Team Activity", PLoS ONE, 5(6): e10937, 2010. [Citation] The question of how to assign individual credit within team activities is an important one which spans various endeavors, from business projects to scientific research collaborations to team sports.  In […]

What I’m up to this week

Conferences and Symposia, Database Development, Hybrid Competitions, Match Data Collection, Paper Discussions, Soccer Pythagorean: Theory

This is a busy week for everyone doing analytics work.  People are rushing to complete their final analyses of the 32 finalists, make tournament predictions, and whatever software tools they need to carry out their tasks.  Here is what I'm working on this week: Debugging the data entry forms that implement the Football Match Result […]

Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Review: Research Paper Session

Conferences and Symposia, Paper Discussions

[This is the third post in a multi-part review of the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.]For the first time in the brief history of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the organizers put together a session that allowed the presentation of research papers.  The papers were split into two categories: those published by academic […]

The second leg effect in Euro club competitions

Knockout Competitions, Paper Discussions, Tournament Design

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 […]

Player valuation, with some help from options pricing theory

Paper Discussions, Player Performance, Player Valuation Models

Radu Tunaru, Ephrahim Clark, and Howard Viney, "An options pricing framework for valuation of football players", Review of Financial Economics, 14: 281-295, 2005.It is important for football club management to know how much their players are worth on the open market.  This publication is the first to use concepts from options pricing to develop a […]

Goal scoring probability over the course of a football match

Goalscoring Models, Paper Discussions

M. J. Dixon and M. E. Robinson, "A birth process model for association football matches", The Statistician, 47(3): 523-538, 1998.How does the probability of the final score change with the relative strength of the two teams, home advantage, time elapsed, and the current score?  This publication describes what's called a "birth process" model and it […]