My work on the soccer Pythagorean is almost done, but there were a couple of trade studies that I wanted to complete before I tied a bow around everything. There were two questions that I wanted to address: Is there a "universal" Pythagorean league exponent, one that applies over all leagues? How do league Pythagorean […]
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 […]
My last post has sparked a question in my soccermetric mind: Are there common features in the offensive and defensive goal distributions for teams with large Pythagorean variances? The Soccer Pythagorean works well at assessing the level of team performance relative to expectations from their goal statistics. It can even predict point totals within a […]
I am so fascinated by Ajax's performance in the league this season, and I'm intrigued that there was such a large gap between the Pythagorean estimate and the actual point total. To be sure, FC Twente's performance also greatly outperformed their Pythagorean estimate. But Ajax's record deserves closer scrutiny because their goalscoring record was so […]
In the wake of recent conversations with people on and off this site, I realize that I really need to give a better explanation of the soccer Pythagorean formula than I have done previously. So in the following lines I hope to give a clear explanation that's understandable to everyone and 95% math free. (The […]
I completed my write-up of my revised derivations of the soccer Pythagorean formula. It fixes the problems that I had with overpredicting points and calculating win and draw probabilities that exceeded unity. Maybe I should come up with a better name, because it no longer looks like the Pythagorean equation.Here's the document link:PythagDerivationVersion2p0.pdf [240kb]I hope […]
For the last few months I've been working on a soccer version of the Pythagorean formula. It's taken me into some interesting directions, and I've learned a lot about probability theory and reacquainted myself with the Weibull continuous distribution, which I haven't seen since an interesting summer internship in Florida almost 20 years ago. I […]
A few weeks ago — four weeks ago, in fact — I said that I would post my submitted paper on the Soccer Pythagorean that was rejected by the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference by the end of the week. Well, a week is a long time in politics and in this site. I apologize […]
Two weeks ago I said that I would post the document containing the derivation of the Soccer Pythagorean formula, but I was trying to complete a modification before uploading the paper on the site. It had to do with the fact that the predicted percentages of wins and draws exceeded 1 in some cases, which […]
About an hour ago I received the following email from the conference organizers: Thank you for submitting your abstract to the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Conference. Unfortunately we received an overwhelming response and, though your paper was excellent, are unable to invite you to the conference at this time. We anticipate that this will be […]
