It's the week of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, so perhaps it's a good time to look up and down my blogroll and write about the soccer analytics work that other people are doing.  I think the last time I did this was during the World Cup; I might make this a semi-regular feature of the blog.  The original intent was to highlight other people's work to fill the time while I working on a project, but there's enough good stuff going around now.

The newest addition on my Soccer Analytics blogroll is the Rational Football blog.  It is a new blog and it's already off to a good start, with a post on goalkeeper actions during penalty kicks and a three-part series on the value of a red card to the two competing teams that merits reading. 

When I checked Waiting for the Equalizer late last year, Goran had used my Pythagorean projections to develop a virtual European league table.  I would have liked to have seen some new posts since then, but the site has been quiet so far this year.  I hope it comes back to life soon.

Graham MacAree's We Ain't Got No History site is always worth reading if you're a Chelsea fan, but the Statistical Analysis section is worth reading if you're interested in soccer analytics.  He has some comments on Florent Malouda being highly ranked by the Actim Index that transition into some comments on the reliability of all these performance indices.  Graham used his sabermetrics experience to make some assessments on the state of football analysis in October of last year that is similar to the Moneyball vs Soccer posts that I've made.  I know it's four months old but it's worth reading to gain another perspective on the soccer analytics problem.

MLS will see its 8000th league goal scored sometime during the opening week, and Climbing the Ladder is tabulating the goals scored by MLS teams across all competitions.  The league will also cross the 10,000th goal milestone across all competitions sometime this season. There's also a post on how long it took MLS teams to score 100 goals, again across all competitions.

Soccer by the Numbers has posts on a variety of topics, from a numerical post-mortem of the Carling Cup final, to the problems associated with pay inequality on teams, to the (surprising) goal value of corner kicks.  Those are among the most recent posts, but the entire page is worth reading.

Zach Slaton of A Beautiful Numbers Game has a review of the book Gaming the World: How Sports is Reshaping Global Politics and Culture.  It's not necessarily a statistics-heavy book, but it's an academic one with some thought-provoking theses.  I'm not sure I agree with all of them, but the book appears to be interesting. Again, there are lots of other interesting posts on the site.