Continuing my statistical review of the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations (as well as continuing my development and testing of my FMRD software library), i start a multi-part study of the rotations made in the starting lineup by the managers in the competition. Squad rotation is a necessity for managers in the modern game as […]
From the Sports Analytics conference site is this article from Sydney's Daily Telegraph about the development of a new performance metric in Australian rugby league and its influence in the outcome of the recently completed National Rugby League season. (more…)
Moneyball, the movie, premieres in Britain this weekend and there will be a private advance screening at Prozone tonight. As part of the advance preparation for the premiere here is an article from the Daily Mail on the impact that Opta and Prozone's data has had on how we understand the Premier League and assess […]
Continuing my look at the finances and on-field results of Major League Soccer, I expand my earlier financial determinism study to the period between 2007 and 2011. This period covers the entire Designated Player era. (more…)
I was looking for other publications that explored the connection between payroll and performance in other American team sports, and came across this interesting series of articles by ESPN's Patrick Hruby published at the beginning of the year on front-office efficiency in American sports leagues. He covers the Big Four sports leagues as well as […]
Now that the 2011 MLS Cup Playoffs are in full swing, I've taken a look back at the just-completed regular season with a post on the relationship between payroll and league performance and another on the marginal payroll cost per point won in the league. In this post, I'll expand the marginal payroll cost study […]
Following on from my previous post on the relationship between Major League Soccer payrolls and on-field performance, I consider how efficient league teams have been in the 2011 regular season. I seek to answer the question, What is an MLS team's cost per point relative to the league average? (more…)
One of the theses of Kuper and Szymanski's book Soccernomics is that team performance in a football league is strongly determined by its payroll; in other words, clubs with highest payrolls finish at the top of the league more often than not. I've seen publications that state the correlation coefficient between payroll and points in […]
Three months ago I wrote an article on the goalscoring characteristics of champion and relegated teams, and showed that champion clubs in general have very tight and consistent defenses. In particular, the goals allowed variance — the spread of the individual numbers about the average goals allowed — tends to be less than 1.0 for […]
Last year I presented a scatter plot of goalscoring variances and color-coded the dots by points per game average of the associated teams. There was quite an overlap between regions, but some trends were evident, especially in defensive goal statistics and league performance. I'm going to expand on that previous post and present data in […]
