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 […]
The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference has released its schedule of events. Several of the sessions will run concurrently, but not as many as I feared. Sunil Gulati will appear in a session parallel to the Emerging Analytics session (with the officials from Man City and Chelsea), so there may be some popping in and out […]
Two weeks ago I said that I would post the document containing the derivation of the Soccer Pythagorean formula, but I was trying to complete a modification before uploading the paper on the site. It had to do with the fact that the predicted percentages of wins and draws exceeded 1 in some cases, which […]
The World Congress on Science and Football is a quadrennial conference that draws academics and professionals from all over the world to discuss issues related to the intersection of football with the physical, mathematical, and social sciences. It is unique in that it has discussions on all of the football codes — from association, to […]
Lionel Page and Katie Page, "The second leg home advantage: Evidence from European football cup competitions", Journal of Sports Sciences, 25(14): 1547-1556, 2007. [Scribd]Following up on my discussions of the two-leg competition in football is a very interesting and thorough paper written by British and Australian researchers. I came across it while reading a Wikipedia […]
In my last post on the two-leg format in soccer (MLS Cup Playoffs vs. UEFA Champions League), I determined that in a typical two-leg series, the club hosting the second leg has a 60% chance of winning (3:2 on in betting parlance). I was wondering if that probability held up during each elimination round in […]
There are times when I see a burst of visits to a long-ago written post and I ask myself, "Why could possible be the cause of that?" Such an event happened today when I saw a lot of hits on my latest CONCACAF coefficients list. So, thanks to Dave and those of you at Sounder […]
Radu Tunaru, Ephrahim Clark, and Howard Viney, "An options pricing framework for valuation of football players", Review of Financial Economics, 14: 281-295, 2005.It is important for football club management to know how much their players are worth on the open market. This publication is the first to use concepts from options pricing to develop a […]
Well, I've had some more time to digest the news about my paper submission. I'm not happy about the final outcome; I thought (like any other submitter) that other people might be interested in what I would be presenting. It doesn't always work out that way, for a variety of reasons (paper not good enough, […]
About an hour ago I received the following email from the conference organizers: Thank you for submitting your abstract to the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Conference. Unfortunately we received an overwhelming response and, though your paper was excellent, are unable to invite you to the conference at this time. We anticipate that this will be […]
