With the Premier League neatly poised at its 190 match mid-point it’s a good time to take stock of where things are. I use my Adjusted Goals rating measure to assess teams’ performance. This isn’t anything too complicated – it’s simply uses a combination of goals, shots on target and shots to rate each team’s…
Month: December 2015
Modeling the draw
One of the trickiest parts of modeling football match outcomes is assessing the likelihood of a draw. In football, unlike many other sports, draws are quite frequent (around 26% of matches). This means that to get a good estimate of the chances of either team winning any assessment of draw likelihood needs to be robust….
Championship – Half term report
What with Christmas and Sky Sports scheduling it’s difficult to keep up with the Championship at the moment, but a quick glance at the table shows 23 games played. The half-way point. Actually, at time of writing, Forest and Leeds still have an outstanding match in the 23rd round of fixtures. But the postponement of…
Leicester City top of the league with 70% pass completion
Leicester City’s remarkable rise to the Premier League summit in 2015 is notable not only for its surprise but also a direct style not normally associated with top teams. The metric I like to use to get a quick indication of a team’s tactical style is pass completion – and on this metric Leicester sit…
The perils of football rating systems
For those that like football and are of a nerdy persuasion, building a football ratings model is a noble pursuit. Intuitively, football (like many other sports) appears a numerical puzzle that can easily be solved – certain patterns, like the percentage of home wins and goals per game, repeat year after year – and the…
States of play and the importance of flexible tactics
Most metrics used to analyse football are accumulated over a whole match – for example, goals, shots and shots on target. Even Expected Goals, the new paradigm for football analytics, which takes multiple information (e.g. distance, angle and type of shot) to assess the goal-scoring likelihood of each chance, simply accumulates these values over the…
EPL Goal projection calculator
Explanation This simple goal projection interactive calculator projects future goals, using adjusted goals as the attack and defence rating for each team. But it’s an interactive spreadsheet, so attack and defence ratings can be amended as desired to take account of factors not fully allowed for in the ratings (which are derived from goals, shots…
Championship projection at 9/12/2015
Adjusted goals projections I’m using my long-term adjusted goal rating (explained here) to predict final league outcomes. A note about the model The projections are generated on a spreadsheet, stochastically simulating 5000 different league outcomes. I’ve modeled the outcome of each match using the rand() random number function to generate goals for and against –…
EPL projection 8 December 2015
Adjusted goals projections I’m using my long-term adjusted goal rating (explained here) to predict final league outcomes. Below are projections for the English Premier League at 8 December 2015. A note about the model The projections are generated on a spreadsheet, stochastically simulating 5000 different league outcomes. I’ve modeled the outcome of each match using…
goal projection 