For the last few months I've been working on a soccer version of the Pythagorean formula. It's taken me into some interesting directions, and I've learned a lot about probability theory and reacquainted myself with the Weibull continuous distribution, which I haven't seen since an interesting summer internship in Florida almost 20 years ago. I […]
I'm starting to switch my attention to options pricing and its application to some problems in the soccer world. I came across this post from a blog called "less bel canto" originally written in August of last year on the use of Black-Scholes to predict a football club's performance over the course of a league […]
And here are the Pythagorean projections for the 2009-2010 Turkish Super League. League Pythagorean exponent is 1.70, same as with English and French leagues. Club GP GF GA Actual Pts Predicted Pts +/- Point Differential Fenerbahce 17 31 17 37 32 +5 Galatasaray 17 36 21 36 32 +4 Bursaspor 17 34 17 35 […]
Following up on my previous post, here are the updated Pythagorean Projections for the 2009-2010 French Ligue 1 at the halfway mark. Club GP GF GA Actual Pts Predicted Pts +/- Point Differential Bordeaux 19 32 12 43 40 +3 Lille 19 37 19 34 37 -3 Montpellier 18 26 21 33 28 +5 […]
A few days ago I presented Pythagorean projections for this year's English Premiership, based on the formula that I developed. I didn't like the fact that the projection overestimated league points, but felt that perhaps the estimated league position might be useful.Over the weekend, I took a much closer look at the derivation of the […]
Following up on my previous posts on Pythagoreans for the English and Turkish leagues, after the jump is a similar table for this season's Ligue 1 in France. (more…)
Yesterday, I published a table of team performance relative to statistical expectations in the English Premier League using my Soccer Pythagorean formula. Today I present a similar table for this season's Turkish Super League. The results are based on mid-season form and displayed in the same manner as before — goals scored and goals allowed, […]
The original purpose behind the Soccer Pythagorean was to determine, in mid-season, whether a team was performing above or below its (statistical) expectations. I've already done some work on developing Pythagorean exponents for various European leagues, and if you've read my paper in the previous post, you would find out that the exponents of the […]
A few weeks ago — four weeks ago, in fact — I said that I would post my submitted paper on the Soccer Pythagorean that was rejected by the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference by the end of the week. Well, a week is a long time in politics and in this site. I apologize […]
The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has released the list of finalists of their research paper competition. I am surprised that there are only four papers in the final competition; I would have expected six to eight. One of the papers is — surprise, surprise — on the Pythagorean expectation in baseball, examining how run […]
