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Are there common features of teams with large Pythagorean variances?

My last post has sparked a question in my soccermetric mind: Are there common features in the offensive and defensive goal distributions for teams with large Pythagorean variances?  The Soccer Pythagorean works well at assessing the level of team performance relative to expectations from their goal statistics.  It can even predict point totals within a […]

A closer look at Ajax’s goal performance

I am so fascinated by Ajax's performance in the league this season, and I'm intrigued that there was such a large gap between the Pythagorean estimate and the actual point total.  To be sure, FC Twente's performance also greatly outperformed their Pythagorean estimate.  But Ajax's record deserves closer scrutiny because their goalscoring record was so […]

Goal scoring probability over the course of a football match

M. J. Dixon and M. E. Robinson, "A birth process model for association football matches", The Statistician, 47(3): 523-538, 1998.How does the probability of the final score change with the relative strength of the two teams, home advantage, time elapsed, and the current score?  This publication describes what's called a "birth process" model and it […]

Pythagorean exponents in the 2008-09 English Premier League

A couple of nights ago I presented goal distributions for all twenty teams in the 2008-09 English Premier League season, in an attempt to calculate the exponent that would be used for my expansion of the Pythagorean.  I realized after my calculation that I needed to consider the sum of the squares of both the […]