From time to time, I get asked what kinds of tools I use to do some of the soccer analytics work that I talk about here. I've thought about it and felt that perhaps I should write a list here. I performed my coefficients work on my Windows laptops, but for everything else I've switched […]
The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has announced its call for papers for the 2011 conference. Next year the conference will be a two-day event (4-5 March), and the research paper contest will be on the second day. The conference is looking for submissions that will present completed research on areas of interest to the […]
I was informed that my paper submission was accepted to the Northern California Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Sports (NCSSORS), to be held in the San Francisco area on 16 October. The paper was actually accepted as a poster presentation, which doesn't carry quite the same prestige as an oral presentation but nevertheless […]
You might have seen what is typically known in the UK as a "results matrix", which is the collection of all results during a league season. Here is one example for the Premier League; here is another for La Liga. It is an elegant and compact way to present results in leagues where all teams […]
The Capello Index has generated a lot of criticism of England coach Fabio Capello since word of the rating system was released before the World Cup. The criticism has intensified since the index was published today, with Capello now demanding that the site be removed from the internet. So what is so wrong with the […]
Brian Moore of the London Daily Telegraph has written a sharply critical article on the attitude of many within England’s football community toward fresh ideas regarding the sport. I’m going to use the article as a springboard to make a larger point about the future of soccer analytics and their impact on the game.Now, this […]
Jordi Duch, Joshua S. Waitzmann, Luís A. Nunes Amaral, "Quantifying the Performance of Individual Players in a Team Activity", PLoS ONE, 5(6): e10937, 2010. [Citation] The question of how to assign individual credit within team activities is an important one which spans various endeavors, from business projects to scientific research collaborations to team sports. In […]
Not everyone reads my other blog, so I'll repeat what I wrote there last week. I am traveling to Europe next week, starting on the 23rd and continuing until 3 July. My trip starts in Munich, where I take delivery of something nice and shiny, which will then allow me to get familiar with Switzerland, […]
As I mentioned in my previous post, the current database design captures matches that occur under a league format without playoffs, at the club and national team level. (Implementation for national teams is a little simpler and redundant at the same time; the tblTeams table is superfluous and can be replaced by tblCountries when designating […]
I've been quiet over the past week, but I've been busy with debugging the implementation of my database and completing its documentation. I've reached a point where I've verified the integrity of the tables and can say that the database design is close enough to a "release" version — version 1.0. It's been a long […]
