Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the OptaPro Forum in London alongside some of my favorite analysts, including Simon Gleave and Garry Gelade, and in front of many others: Paul Riley, Mark Taylor, Colin Trainor, Michael Cox, and Omar Chaudhuri, to name just a few. I spoke about creating metrics for players and teams using expected goals – but without basing the models on shots. (Click here for the video.) The first part of the talk outlined my work to date with shots-based models, summarized here. Next I recapped the “danger zone entries” model posted here in December….
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Did referees want Liverpool to win the league?
Last season Liverpool, a storied soccer club that hasn’t won England’s top division since 1990, was in the race for the title down to the final day. Having finished seventh the previous campaign, everything was finally going right – but did the referees have anything to do with it? Liverpool certainly had plenty of English fans, regardless of their favorite team, rooting for them to unseat the league’s recent powerhouses. Their dogged captain, Steven Gerrard, supplied a fiery passion to the team, and the effervescent talents of Raheem Sterling, Daniel Sturridge, and Luis Suárez provided the goals. As Liverpool’s mainly…
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Managing the player portfolio
Recently I posted an NYA presentation on player contributions to cash flow that outlined how players could be viewed as capital assets. In part because of the recent interest in work by Howard Hamilton and Tom Worville, I’ve decided to post portions of an earlier presentation on managing the player portfolio. Portfolio management is a field that many people dabble in as individual investors and a few people take to sophisticated extremes as professionals. You don’t have to use the fanciest quantitative models to be a successful manager, though. A few basic insights and tools can greatly enhance the health…
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