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 […]
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 […]
I learned about this iPhone app from ZonalMarking.com's Twitter feed this morning, and it appears to be very interesting. It is called Total Football 2010 and it uses Opta data feeds to create graphical views of player and team performance in a match. The plan is to update the performance live during the match so […]
When I talk about statistics in soccer, I tend to group them into two different classes. I’ve even written posts where I have made such distinctions but without much definition. I’d like to take a step back and discuss what I feel are two important classes of data in soccer: macro-statistics and micro-statistics. (more…)
It's probably odd for me to say this considering how much I look at the analytical side of sports, but I've never been a big fan of fantasy sports. Part of the reason is that I'm incredibly lazy and find it hard to make the effort required to become knowledgeable about the players and make […]
I am reading through that book on database design, and it has helped me greatly in formulating an effective database for my research projects. The book has also shown me where I have made mistakes before in previous attempts at database development, and I hope to create something more useful this time around. Maybe I'll […]
Continuing with the discussion on adjusted plus/minus, below is a presentation that Wayne Winston made at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports last September on player and lineup analysis in the NBA. Wayne Winston is a professor at Indiana University's business school and the developer of the original adjusted plus/minus system (the Dallas […]
I had some more time to think about the plus/minus scores published at the Climbing the Ladder blog, and I posted a comment to the post a few minutes ago. My critiques of the current version are that it uses solely 11v11 match situations, treats the periods of 11v11 play as one contiguous block, and […]
Before I left for Boston I mentioned a post by Climbing the Ladder that published plus/minus data for the previous MLS season. It's a good start, but some of the results just didn't pass the laugh test for me. (I'll explain why much later today.) While I was at the conference, I talked with Joe […]
Blogger "scaryice" of Climbing the Ladder has compiled plus/minus ratings for the 2009 MLS season, with raw and adjusted data that give some results that might be surprising to people. I've thought of plus/minus ratings at various times in the past, but I'm not so sure that a plus/minus rating translates well to soccer. I […]
