A few years ago I wrote a guest blog at OptaPro proposing the Premier League’s stars of the future, based on a simple check of some old models. And guess what – after a year or two, it seemed like I hadn’t done very well! So I decided to figure out a better way of spotting young prospects. Here is the gist. Young players can’t be expected to perform on the pitch in the same way as established regulars. They’re still learning the game, they may be playing an unfamiliar position, and the psychological pressures of senior football can be intense. Every…
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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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Does soccer analytics work?
(Alternate title: “Do football analytics work?”) This is a question that I like to ask – I don’t find it insulting, dismissive, or silly. To answer it, first we have to define analytics, and then we can talk about whether it might be any good. So let’s start with the basics. There’s a hierarchy in the way we use numbers in soccer, or really any field: We can count things: “Joe Fullback made 32 tackles last season.” Or we can do some simple arithmetic: “Joe Fullback made 1.5 tackles per game last season.” And we can try to add some context: “Joe…
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