I’ve spent the past seven years working in soccer/football analytics, and one complaint that I often hear is that so much work is only visible behind closed doors. Another is that analytics hasn’t gone mainstream. I think these two things are connected. So for me, it’s time to bring analytics out into the open, and that’s why NYA has launched smarterscout.com, where basic membership (smarterscout Lite) is free. Right now smarterscout is in beta, and we’ll be adding plenty of features in the coming months. But we wanted to get an early version of the site online because, to be…
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Models
Who are the most skillful coaches in Europe?
It’s been a while since I posted anything here about coaches. I have a lot of love for coaches, even those with whom I haven’t always agreed. Their job is tough, especially when they have to deal with recruiting, tactics, man-management, the media, and even renting the training pitch. Some coaches get paid a ton, but most of them don’t. They all endure crushing pressure and huge emotional swings. The only “bad” coaches are the ones who are cruel, prejudiced, or lazy. But there are still discernible differences in skill. There’s an adage in soccer that only a small number of coaches can make a…
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What do guideline probabilities offer for betting?
Betting seems like an obvious application for analytics, but that doesn’t mean the analytics is easy. New information that’s pertinent to a fixture can come in at any moment right up until kickoff, and we’ll never be able to specify a model that takes account of everything. For that matter, we’d never be able to calibrate such a huge model properly, either, since we’d be dealing with lots of situations that weren’t quite identical. So what can we do? In theory, we’d like to create a huge model of the game that could suck up any kind of news: injuries, coaching changes, the…
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