We continue our league projections for the 2013-14 European season, starting with the decidedly non-European league in South Africa.South Africa: This league kicked off a couple of weeks ago. We think the Premier Soccer League will be very close, but Kaiser Chiefs could sneak a title from SuperSport United, Orlando Pirates, and Platinum Stars. At […]
We continue our projections of selected European leagues in 2013-14 with eight more competitions in France, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Russia. In Part I of this series, we explain how we developed these projections.Here we go —France (Ligue 1): Most observers expect PSG and Monaco to be the top two teams in Ligue 1 given […]
We introduce league projections on Soccermetrics for over 20 leagues that follow the European calendar. Most of these leagues are in Europe, of course, but there are also leagues in the Americas, Africa, and Asia that also follow such a schedule.To make these projections we first project the goals scored and allowed by a team. […]
I see that my posts on match tempo have attracted a lot of attention and comments. Some of them disagree with my approach and/or ask some interesting questions. I don’t have a problem with that — the existence of critical comments indicates that people care enough about what your work to pose them.One comment asked […]
A few weeks ago I wrote my thoughts on match tempo as it is currently defined in soccer. Essentially, the possessions per team metric, one borrowed from basketball, runs into some limitations when applied to football or other invasion sports conducted over a large playing area. This opinion is not a knock on other analysts […]
In my previous post on match tempo, I presented a chart that compared final league position to average possessions per game and average effective time in a match. It was rude of me to introduce a term and not define it, much less discuss it, so I’ll do so now.I’ve been fascinated by the idea […]
Match tempo is an important metric in soccer and other field invasion sports because it provides the context for understanding other in-game actions such as possession and offensive and defensive output. Much of the pioneering work in tempo in sport started with people such as Dean Oliver, John Hollinger, and Ken Pomeroy in basketball and […]
The 2012-13 European football season came to an end this weekend, at least in the top flight. It won’t be officially over until the first of July, but it’s time to take a look back at the season and examine which teams were significant performers (or underperformers) relative to their statistical expectations. And once again, […]
It’s the last international break of the 2012-13 European season, so it’s a good time to look at the major European leagues and observe which clubs have been over- or under-performing this season.I don’t need to tell you that the Big Five European leagues are pretty much decided, and have been decided for a while. […]
[This post is based on a research paper that I wrote with Aaron Nielsen and submitted to the MIT SSAC Research Paper competition. It didn’t advance to the final round but we hope that the results are of interest to the analytics community. We’ll continue refining this work throughout the year.]Exec Summary: We perform a […]
