I've spent the last three weeks working on a research paper with a local professor, and it's been kicking my tail. Conference paper submissions can be a real pain in the rear sometimes. (It's not related to soccer, in case you were wondering, and if my paper gets accepted I'd love to discuss it in […]
As I mentioned in a post over a month ago, I was accepted to present a poster at this year's Northern California Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Sports. The list of oral and poster presentations has been finalized and you can view it at the NCSSORS website. The conference is dominated by presentations […]
The laptop that I use for my research projects is still down, so instead I am highlighting the work of someone else on this blog. Dave Clark of Sounder at Heart has been doing some work with the proprietor of the Behind the Net hockey website, which is a rich compendium of hockey statistical analysis. […]
I've taken advantage of my enforced downtime to setup a new link category on my site. This category is called Soccer Analytics Blogs, and it — surprise! — contains a list of blogs that touch on various topics in soccer analytics. There are other sites that are popping up or those that I am just […]
I have a couple of posts in the pipeline for my other website that explore a hypothetical merger between CONCACAF and CONMEBOL, and I started thinking about the probability of Caribbean countries qualifying for the World Cup from CONCACAF and how that might change in a larger 50-team region. (With 30 associations, the Caribbean countries […]
Just about all of the teams in Major League Soccer have 10-12 matches remaining, so it is a good place to look at how the teams' performances compare to their statistical expectations. I published similar tables on the 6th of June and the 1st of May. Same thing as before — league Pythagorean exponent of 1.70, […]
I like looking for neat patterns in numbers, so the Chicago Fire's current record in MLS grabbed my eye:GP 18 W 6 D 6 L 6 GF 26 GA 26 Pts 24There's a strange kind of beauty in that record, but it does mean that the Fire are out the playoff positions as things stand […]
Yesterday's Chelsea-Wigan match in the Premier League was remarkable, but not for the 6-0 scoreline, another heavy concession by Wigan or Didier Drogba's hat-trick of assists. It was remarkable for the fact that there were no corner kicks taken. According to Opta Sports, this is the first time this has happened since the company started […]
A couple of months ago, I published a specifications document for version 1.0 of my match result database. Between then and now, I went through the document and addressed some of the items on my to-do list, such as name changes to a couple of the tables and additional fields to other tables. I also […]
I've spent a lot of time on data collection and modeling, and not as much on analytics. To fill the gap I've decided to focus on what other people did with respect to statistical analysis during the World Cup:Waiting for the equalizer is a site written by a Serbian football fan that has some interesting […]
