Major League Soccer is beta-testing its new website which is to be enhanced with in-match data from Opta Sports. There are more data presented than before, but consider me decidedly underwhelmed by the total package. First of all, there are no data that indicate where, specifically, on the field a match event occurred. It is [...]
Yavuz, M., Inan, U.H., Figlali, A. "Fair referee assignments for professional football leagues", Computers and Operations Research, 35: 2937-2951, 2008. [Citation] [From the abstract] Assignment of referees to football games is an important problem faced in professional football leagues. Despite its importance, the problem has received limited academic attention. This paper presents a model and [...]
I closed my Post Office box today, so I've removed my mailing address from the site. I wasn't receiving items often enough to justify spending the money for it. From time to time I receive offers from publishers or other people to send me books and other soccer-related items; if you wish to send me [...]
To continue the previous post, if you are interested in sports scheduling, there are a number of sites that you could visit. First, Michael Trick's website is a treasure trove of information on sports scheduling and the optimization algorithms that are used to solve them. I highly recommend reading the survey papers on round-robin scheduling [...]
K. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, "Solving the Traveling Tournament Problem: A Combined Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approach", E. Burke and P. Causmaeher (eds.), Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science 2740, 63-77, (2004). [PDF] The traveling tournament problem asks if there exists a competition schedule that allows teams in a league to play each [...]
Simon Harriyott was kind enough to send me a link to his report on the recently concluded Science and Football conference, and you can find his post here. The conference also has a collection of selected presentations on its website. MORE: John Sinnott sent me another link, to a presentation by Darren Burgess of Liverpool [...]
Last week I wrote about a proportional allocation scheme for the NCAA basketball tournament, drawing on my experience from developing league coefficients for soccer competitions in North America. I'll apply the scheme to soccer by considering how a similar allocation of "at-large" slots might work for the UEFA Champions League.
This is a soccer-centric blog, and I am to keep it that way, but I also know that a lot of basketball analysts read this site. With that in mind I am going to write about something basketball related that draws upon my experience with developing league coefficients for CONCACAF club competitions in soccer. It's [...]
The Science and Football conference took place in East London yesterday. If any of my readers attended it and would like to write a summary of what happened and their impressions of the conference, I would greatly appreciate your contribution. I can publish your report here (properly attributed, of course) or link to your own [...]
[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 [...]
