Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 German 1. Bundesliga season, for matches played up to 11 March 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. Hannover 96 have cooled off considerably, but they are still vastly overperforming the rest of the Bundesliga and lie in a Champions League place. Stuttgart have improved from their [...]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 Italian Serie A season, for matches played up to 11 March 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. I use points earned on the field of play, so Bologna's point deductions are not taken into account. League Table Pythagorean Team GP W D L GF GA [...]
Below is the Pythagorean table for the 2010-11 French Ligue 1, for matches played up to 11 March 2011. The league Pythagorean exponent is 1.70. Lille appear to be performing in line with their expectations, but Rennes have managed to cobble wins despite the lack of a consistent goalscorer. As a result they have a [...]
I am very pleased to announce that I have been invited to attend the Leaders in Performance conference, to be held at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea FC on the 7th of October. I am flattered, humbled, and honored that the organizers invited me, and I am looking forward to interacting with football managers, technical and performance [...]
D. R. Brillinger, "A Potential Function Approach to the Flow of Play in Soccer", Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 3(1): Article 3, 2007. [Link] How does one describe mathematically the run of play in a soccer match? In this paper, the author proposes a scalar potential to describe in time and space the sequence [...]
I had promised myself that I wouldn't write more big-picture posts about soccer analytics, but I can't help myself this time. On the drive home, I was listening to the Brian Kenny show on ESPN Radio and the substitute host John Kincaide was discussing the ongoing NFL lockout talks. Kincaide voiced his doubts that either [...]
I am back in Arizona after a highly productive weekend at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and I've recovered enough from the day's travel to do some work. Sarah Rudd told me about a site that she has set up to aggregate posts from other soccer analytics people and allow those in the field [...]
The 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has concluded, and for me it has been a very productive and encouraging conference. As everyone knows, I attended the Soccer Analytics session this morning and was thrilled to know that a lot of people — panelists and attendees alike — read this blog and enjoy it. The [...]
It's Day 2 of the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and it's the day of the Soccer Analytics session. I'm really excited about today, not just because of the session, but also because I will be liveblogging it on my site. It's the first time I've liveblogged anything at Soccermetrics (I've done it on [...]
On the heels of the Opta announcement is another opportunity for soccer analytics people that I found out about at the SSAC today. There is a startup called StatDNA that has devoted a lot of time to collect in-match data and develop statistical measurements that generate information from those data. They are organizing a contest [...]
