Category Archives: Analysis

Best Slice Of The Pie

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Last week the BBC compiled a survey on the prices of all aspects of a football match, including pies for 10 football leagues in England and Scotland. This data led Lib Dem MP Tim Farron to table a motion in the House of Commons calling “On honourable members to encourage people to go and see local non-League teams like Kendal Town or Barrow in the South Lakes, where ticket prices are 60-80% cheaper”.

While it may be much cheaper, even Tim Fallon would agree the quality of football that you’ll see at a Kendal Town would be much lower than that of a Premier League match.  We therefore set out to see which of the clubs were charging more or less than we would expect for their quality of football.

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Are Bayern Munich at Home in the UCL Final?

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Seems a silly question, right? The final will be at Bayern’s home stadium. But it won’t be full of Bayern’s fans, as it is when they usually play. So are they really going to enjoy the full effects of home advantage?

Home European Cup Finals

There are previous instances of European club finals being played at one of the teams’ home grounds: Madrid won the European Cup “at home” in 56/57, Inter won in 64/65 and Roma lost in 83/84. In the UEFA Cup, Feyenoord won in 01/02, Sporting Lisbon lost in 04/05 and finally in the European Cup Winners Cup Barcelona won in 81/82. Thanks Wikipedia!

So four wins and two losses, that’s exactly what you’d expect with full home advantage in effect and two teams of equal ability. But most of these matches are far in the past: maybe the home teams were strong favourites and maybe the stadia all those years ago really were full of home fans. Is there anything else that can help us?

Home Domestic European Cup Finals

I was surprised to find (thanks again, Wikipedia) that French, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish have been played at club grounds, and there have been many instances of cup finals “at home”.

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Do Teams with Better Squad Depth Benefit during Christmas Fixtures? Ho.. Ho.. Ho

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It’s almost Christmas again. I like Christmas. Not only do I get a holiday, there is also plenty of football to watch thanks to the Premier League. Not so lucky for the players though!

Teams often play up to four matches during the busy Christmas to New Year period in the space of less than 2 weeks.  What I started to wonder was which teams give their fans a merry time in the festive season, and which teams have been to too many Christmas parties.

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Premier League Goal Glut – What Goal Glut?!

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What an exciting start to the season. At nearly three goals per game, there have been plenty of great matches. Outlandish score-lines such as 8-2, 1-6 and 3-5 have led commentators to scratch their heads.

The Guardian asks whether it’s money spent on strikers, and Yahoo cites improved attacks and failures at the back. But is the goal glut real?

Short Term Variation

The power of statistics is that it accounts for short term variation. When information is limited, we should be wary about drawing conclusions from our observations.

So when we get an “unusual” result, such as 2.98 goals per game so far this season, we can use statistics to tell us if that really is a surprise, or if it’s to be expected – after all, we’ve only seen 99 games.

How to Predict Goals Scored

We use our team strength model to predict Premier League matches. Total goals is something we can predict. At the start of the season, for example, we predicted Liverpool to score 1.69 and concede 1.02 goals at home to average Premier League opposition.

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Do Teams Collapse after a Bad Defeat?

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Ouch, 1:6. Clearly it was not a good weekend for Man Utd fans, especially as no one saw it coming. As an Arsenal fan, I could argue that the 8:2 result wasn’t so bad as Man Utd were flying high and Arsenal were in turbulent times. But it was a lie. It hurt just as bad. After the match, Wenger jumped forward to offer his sympathy for Sir Alex. I doubt Sir Alex cares. The defeat gives City now a 30% chance to win the title, with Man Utd having 27%. 5 points from the top of the table and with more than 3 quarters of league still to go, he and Man Utd fans will be anxious to see just how the team will respond to that result.

So do teams start to underperform after a shocking defeat? I decided to take a look.

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On the Uselessness of Draws

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How many times does a manager or a player claim “a draw was a good result?” Whether this is justifying the result after the fact (i.e. if you’ve been 3-0 down a draw is certainly a good result), or whether the team went out to play for a draw, I decided to see how often a draw really was a good result given the pre-match predictions.

Who’s Happy With a Draw?

A draw is better than a loss and the one league point it brings is some comfort to fans, but more often it is two points lost rather than one point gained. Consider a match between evenly matched sides. In that case the home team has about a 50% chance of victory, and the away team about a 25% chance. Continue reading →

Analysing Major League Soccer

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We’ve been working with Castrol and MLS since March to deliver the MLS Castrol Index. Beyond player ratings, we’ll be predicting the MLS Cup Playoffs once the regular season is finished. So we’ve been taking a look at MLS teams and the structure of the league…

Team Strengths

We applied our team strength model, using weighted historical full time scores to rate teams, to MLS. Who’s looking good this season? Seattle is the standout team in terms of goal scoring threat – we rate them as scoring 1.6 goals on neutral territory against the average MLS opponent. After Seattle, the next best teams are remarkably evenly matched, with Red Bull New York in second scoring only 0.2 more goals against the average opponent than Columbus Crew, ranked 12th. MLS Teams Scoring and Conceding rates Continue reading →

Is Spanish Football Broken?

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The start of La Liga was delayed, Sevilla president Del Nido claimed La Liga is “A load of rubbish”, Real Madrid and Barcelona romp home most weeks by massive margins – is Spanish football broken?

In our work with the Fink Tank (paywall) we’ve tracked competitiveness for the past few years. One recurring pattern is that the Championship is more competitive than the Premier League. Let’s look at competitiveness across Europe and see how Spain compares.

We should cite some related work – Soccer By the Numbers used the variation in wins across teams to measure competitiveness, and 5 Added Minutes looked at points per game gained by top five and bottom five teams.

These analyses are worth a read. However, Spain doesn’t really stand out as an uncompetitive league using those rough measures since it’s only the top two teams who have extreme results (see our La Liga pre-season predictions). We used a different approach to highlight why Spain is different.

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Should Arsenal Worry About Conversion?

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11/12 Goal Conversion ByClub After 4 MatchesArsenal have scored only three goals this season. Should they be worried about their inability to convert shots into goals?

Arsenal fan @Orbinho – mentor to @OptaJoe – tweeted that Man Utd have scored with 30% of their shots last season while Arsenal have only managed to score with 7% of theirs. The chart shows that they rank equal 14th, alongside West Brom and Norwich, in terms of shot conversion this season.

Last season Arsenal ranked fourth with a shot-to-goal conversion rate of 14%. Man Utd topped the conversion charts with 16.4% of their shots finding the back of the net.

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Summer Transfers 2011: Part Two

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Read Part One here

Here’s another way to visualise transfers – by date. Again, thanks to the fantastic BBC transfers resource for the data.

According to the BBC within-association transfers can begin as soon as domestic competitions finish and they go on (as anyone who watches Sky Sports News will know) until 11pm on 31st August. I was interested to find out what type of transfers happen when and whether “transfer deadline day” really is as exciting as Jim White makes it sound.

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