The Pythagorean residual of a team, defined as the difference between its actual and expected point totals given identical goal statistics, is used often to assess roughly its under-performance or over-performance. But can that residual be used to assess managerial performance, too?I’ve looked at Pythagorean tables for the most recent seasons of the English Premier League […]
When I was evaluating last season’s league projections and creating this season’s with the Pythagorean expectation, I was reminded that I hadn’t really studied which pairs of goals scored and allowed result in a specific expected point total. In a league competition, it’s possible to reach a point total in various ways, and the combination […]
A few days ago we pushed some updates to the web service that supplies match result data to our ResultsPage app, and we’d like to share one of these new features to you.As you know, ResultsPage calculates various types of league tables on a round-by-round basis, one of them being the Pythagorean table. We’ve isolated […]
I see that a lot of people have been visiting this site because of Devin Pleuler’s article on the soccer Pythagorean expectation that we’ve developed. Welcome to Soccermetrics! We’re all about creating knowledge and insight from the data revolution that has overtaken soccer in the last few years. (more…)
I had been engaged in an email exchange with a reader very recently about my soccer Pythagorean which required me to revisit the expression. I came to look at the Pythagorean in a slightly different way, but one that improved my own understanding of it. I’d like to share it and hopefully it will be […]
It's taken a very long time to get to this point, but my paper on the Soccer Pythagorean has been published in the recent edition of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. You can find a link to the paper here. Thanks to all who helped bring this about, and it is my hope and […]
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 […]
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…)
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 […]
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 […]
