[Oh wow, it's a Sounder-lanche! Thanks, guys!]I wanted to take a look at how national teams that form a confederation are distributed through the FIFA World Rankings, which I claim serves as a proxy for the relative strength of the confederations. Ordinal data are taken from the March 2011 FIFA rankings, separated for the six […]
ESPN, through Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus and Fivethirtyeight.com fame, has rolled out a Soccer Power Index that intends, "to provide the best possible objective representation of a national team's current overall skill level." I'm looking through the explanation of the index and at first glance it attempts to make the best of the statistics […]
As I said in my last post on my extended Pythagorean formula for soccer, I was in the process of compiling score data for the 2008-09 English Premier League season in order to test this formulation. The first step was to fit the data to a Weibull probability distribution in order to estimate the alpha […]
I completed my Soccer Pythagorean document a couple of days ago, but for some reason I had the hardest time developing a PDF file (I used LyX). I figured it out tonight and I'm linking it to the site now. I greatly appreciate your comments.Download PythagDerivationMORE (23 October, 10:50pm): I'm compiling some score data from […]
** BUMPED to the top with updates added **I want to give an update on my efforts to derive a Pythagorean (or Pythagorean-like) formula for use in soccer. As I said in other posts, the most challenging part is coming up with the term that captures the probability of a drawn result. This is rather […]
A few days ago, I wrote about an email discussion I was having on soccer Pythagoreans. (Here's some more information on Pythagoreans in general in case you don't know what they are.) The development of soccer Pythagoreans is an interesting problem, and an open problem in my opinion because the underlying premises of the Pythagorean […]
The other night I found myself included on a message thread where a guy (this one) is attempting to develop a soccer Pythagorean formula that would allow him to predict the number of points won over a league season based on the number of goals scored and allowed by a team over a season. From […]
S. E. Hallinan, "Paired comparison models for ranking national soccer teams", M.S. Thesis, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 2005. [PDF]This thesis extends a Bradley-Terry statistical model to accommodate for drawn results, home advantage, and neutral site matches and applies it to international results over the last ten years in order to develop an […]
