Back in February, I introduced a non-shots expected goals model at the OptaPro Analytics Forum, drawing on earlier work from a year ago. I talked about a simple version of the ball progression model that’s now one of several evaluators used by NYA. As the name suggests, the ball progression model gives teams credit for moving the ball based on the chances of scoring goals from the resulting positions. How should we interpret its results? The first generation of expected goals models attached a probability of scoring to each shot rather than to reaching specific positions on the field. These…
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Month: December 2015
Claudio Ranieri, best manager in the Premier League?
Yesterday Claudio Ranieri scooped the English Premier League’s manager of the month award, and few would dispute that he deserved it. In fact, here at NYA we’d give him a manager of the season award for the matches played so far. NYA’s experimental manager ratings put him well ahead of the pack. This means that Ranieri has apparently achieved much more than the ability of his squad suggested was possible. Taking luck out of the picture – and he’s had some of that, too – Leicester has overachieved relative to their quality in a way that may indeed be sustainable….
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Chronicle of a sacking foretold
Followers of this blog – and my Twitter feed – will know the story by now. In June, I tweeted that Swansea City was extremely fortunate to have finished 8th in the Premier League last season. In early August, I showed that Garry Monk was indeed a lucky manager who had done a subpar job in his first season. In late August, I suggested that Swansea’s first four matches of the new season had been atypically good and asked whether something had changed. Today, there is a change: Monk is out. I can’t say whether this was the right decision for Swansea,…
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