When I talk about statistics in soccer, I tend to group them into two different classes. I’ve even written posts where I have made such distinctions but without much definition. I’d like to take a step back and discuss what I feel are two important classes of data in soccer: macro-statistics and micro-statistics. (more…)
In the afterglow of recent analytics conferences, Bruno Aziza poses the question, "What are analytics?" And he gives an answer by focusing on their predictive nature, which is different from their evaluative nature that I've examined on Soccermetrics.
Back in November 2009 there was a discussion on the Sounders At Heart website on soccer statistics, and this site had been cited, among others. I had followed some of the thread, and it brought me back to something I probably mentioned briefly: what is a good statistic in soccer?Perhaps we can answer the question […]
I had meant to comment on Tim Vickery's well-deserved ridicule of the latest IFFHS rankings, but The Run of Play blog posted some comments of their own and provided a link to Vickery's post. The authors divide the current state of soccer statistics into two categories: (1) those that are useless and downright counterproductive (the […]
Billy Beane, as some of you know, is the GM of the Oakland A's and the inspiration behind Michael Lewis' book, Moneyball. Bill Gerrard is a professor of Sport Management and Finance at the Leeds University Business School and has been collaborating with Beane on extensions of the Moneyball approach to soccer.I was trawling the […]
This was a post I wrote on my primary blog, and I’m reproducing it here.————–A couple of years ago I read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, which is an excellent book on the 2002 Oakland Athletics and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that assembled that team. I was living in the Bay Area when the A’s went on their […]
