How quickly can a club’s fortunes turn around? Swansea City finished eighth in the last English Premier League season, but quite a few statistics suggested they benefited from luck. So much luck, in fact, that a few months ago I tweeted something rather pejorative about the team: Now, you don’t have to be an analytics expert to see why I tweeted this. Just look at the table: No team above Swansea had a negative goal difference, and Swansea’s goal difference was the same as West Ham’s, down in 12th place. In contrast with the Hammers, Swansea got their goals at…
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Month: August 2015
Pitfalls of measuring shooting and saving skill
One of the biggest and most important challenges in sports analytics is asking the right question. Many metrics are produced and published without any sense of how precise they are, what assumptions they rely on, and how they might be used in practice. As a result, it’s hard to phrase questions that the metrics can answer correctly, at least from a statistical point of view. Shooting and saving skill are cases in point. Recently Michael Caley, one of the best soccer analysts doing public work, suggested an approach to measuring shooting skill. Like others before him, he chose to focus…
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Which clubs have the Premier League’s hidden gems?
Back in June, after one of Ecuador’s matches in the Copa América, I tweeted about Jefferson Montero being one of just three players from Swansea City with an above average rating in both of my public models. Now in his peak years for performance on the pitch, he’s a player any Premier League club would like to have on its roster. Moreover, coming from a middling team, he might have been available cheaply to a bigger club acting early in the current transfer window. But was he the only hidden gem in the league? The computer says no. Below is…
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