These are the show notes for Episode #10 of the Soccermetrics Podcast, with guest Oliver Page. This interview was recorded on 21 February 2014 from my Atlanta office.

Oliver Page is a sports trader with experience at a number of firms in the United Kingdom and interests in applying academic research and mathematical concepts to sports statistics and betting.  His work appears at a number of spots online, including Sports Trading Network, Inside Fantasy Premier League, and Statsbomb.  Oliver was one of the presenters at the recently held OptaPro Analytics Forum and I liked his presentation on shotmaking strategies and goal expectation in football.  He had a much more clever and very British title for his talk, which he will further elaborate upon during the podcast.

In this episode Oliver and I discussed the following:

• His motivation for the project, and the meaning of the catch phrase
• The theoretical model of shot-taking that he used
• The main results from his analysis and how they compare to findings of other researchers
• Development of a game theory model as we attempt to analyze the influence of the defending team
• Changes in the sports trading/betting industry and the parallels to the hedge funds
• The challenges of communicating probabilistic information to the football enterprise, and the risks of falling into deterministic analysis

Web links to relevant resources referenced during our conversation:

• Oliver Page on Twitter
• Selected articles by Oliver Page:
  • The Scottish Play
  • The Evolution of Sports Trading in Europe
  • An attempt to rank world leagues through crowdsourcing
• Rob Carroll’s comments on the OptaPro Analytics Forum
• An introduction to game theory and 4th down decision-making at Advanced NFL Stats

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As always, we welcome your feedback on the episode, whether on content or technical matters.  You can make your feedback in the comments section (recommended for content-related discussions) or by emailing [email protected] (recommended for technical issues).