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Applying the Pythagorean Expectation to Football: Part One
IntroductionThe Baseball Pythagorean Expectation is a formula originally derived by Bill James to estimate how many games a baseball team could be expected to win over a season based on the number of...
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Applying the Pythagorean Expectation to Football: Part Two
IntroductionIn my previous article, I discussed how to apply the baseball Pythagorean expectation to football and how to measure the error of the predictions using RMSE. This second article will...
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Using the Pythagorean Expectation Across Leagues Wordwide
IntroductionI showed in my last post that my initial version of the Pythagorean Expectation (MPE) predicted total points for the English Premier League (EPL) pretty well, with an RMSE of approximately...
View ArticleWhat Has Caused Dimitar Berbatov’s Recent Lack of Goals?
IntroductionUp until week 12 of the season, Dimitar Berbatov was one of the English Premier League’s top goal scorers and goal creators. However, since then he has gone 450 minutes without registering...
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How Early In The Season Can Pythagorean Predictions Be Made?
IntroductionThe next stage for developing my refined version of the Pythagorean equation (known as the MPE) is to characterise how much data it actually needs to make accurate football...
View ArticlePredicting The Premier League Using The Refined Pythagorean Equation
IntroductionNew article for Betting Expert looking at the current Premier League standings compared with the predictions from my refined version of the Pythagorean Expectation.Comments
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Predicting Football Matches Using Shot Data
IntroductionPreviously on this blog I have discussed my attempts at using the Poisson distribution to predict the number of goals scored in football matches. So far, the results have been disappointing...
View ArticleWhat Is The Chance of Bradford City reaching Wembley?
With League Two’s Bradford City only one match away from playing at Wembley in the League Cup final I thought it would be interesting to see what the chances were of them getting this far.It has been...
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Predicting Football Matches Using Shot Data Part Two
IntroductionHaving found that the correlation between goals scored and shots on target was the strongest of the various shooting variables I had available to me, I decided to see how well they could...
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Understanding Elo Ratings
What are Elo Ratings?The Elo rating system was originally devised by its creator Arphad Elo as a way to calculate the average skill levels of two chess players. Although the system was created...
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Understanding Elo Ratings Part Two
IntroductionNow that we understand the theory behind Elo Ratings, let’s take a look at how to calculate them and how to make them more relevant to football.Calculating Elo RatingsThe equation for...
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Introducing the Eastwood Index
IntroductionMy past couple of articles have focused on Elo ratings and how they can be applied to football teams to rank them against each other and to estimate win probabilities.Problems with Elo...
View ArticleEI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
The EILast week was a big test for my new EI Index– it had finally reached the point where I was confident it was working well enough to post its predictions in public.For those people who haven’t come...
View ArticleEI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
Since last week’s predictions turned out to be so popular I thought I would continue testing the EI index in public so here are this week’s predictions. Fingers crossed they turn out well again!Home...
View ArticleEI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
Here we go again!Last Week was another success for the EI, with seven out of the ten predicted favourites winning their matches. It is still a bit early to be drawing too many conclusions but so far...
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How Much Risk Should a Football Manager Take?
IntroductionHow much risk should a football manager take if their team is the underdog in a match? Should they take on the opposing team to try and win the game or sit back and just try not to lose?...
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Is Brendan Rogers Improving Liverpool?
IntroductionAs well as using my EI Index to predict future matches, it can also be used to look back at how team’s performances have changed over time. An interesting example is Liverpool, who sacked...
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How Accurate Are The EI Football Predictions?
IntroductionUnfortunately time caught up with me last week and I was unable to post any predictions from my Eastwood Index. However, since then I have been busy validating the results to see how...
View ArticleEI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
After last week’s international matches, domestic football is finally back so here are this weekend’s match predictions using my EI predictive model. Let’s see if it can keep up its good form and...
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Understanding Total Shot Ratio in Football
IntroductionThe use of Total Shot Ratio (or TSR) seems to have slowly been gaining ground so I thought it would be worth analyzing the statistic in more detail to see what it can and cannot do.What is...
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EI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
A couple of weeks back I demonstrated how the EI is more accurate than the bookies based on rank probability scores but a few people have asked if I can do something a bit simpler so Figure 1 shows how...
View ArticleEI Match Predictions for the English Premier League
Here we go with this week’s predictions from the Eastwood Index (EI)!The EI doesn’t hold out much chance for Wigan or West Ham getting three points off the two Manchester clubs this week, with the...
View ArticleEI Match Probabilities for the English Premier League
It’s been a busy day but I’ve finally got the probabilities for this weekend’s matches completed.There are some pretty close games, with QPR Vs Stoke, Tottenham Vs Man City and Liverpool Vs Chelsea all...
View ArticleEI Match Probabilities for the English Premier League
It’s Friday again so here are this weekend’s match probabilities for the English Premier League.I was a little surprised to see Manchester United come out as favourites against Arsenal, even they they...
View ArticleWhat Is A Meaningful Sample Size?
IntroductionI had an article published at Betting Expert last week looking at how to determine statistically how much data you need to make accurate predictions.Find out more by reading the rest of...
View ArticleHow Much Does Luck Affect Football?
IntroductionI’ve written a new article for Betting Expert quantifying how much luck affects football. Take a look here as it is probably more than you are expecting!Comments
View ArticleHow Much Does Luck Affect MLS?
IntroductionFollowing my recent article for Betting Expert quantifying how large a role luck plays in the English Premier League (EPL) I thought it would be interesting to look at Major League Soccer...
View ArticleEI Match Probabilities for the English Premier League
Here are the latest match probabilities for the English Premier League calculated using the Eastwood Index (EI).Please note that I have not included next week’s mid-week matches yet as the odds for...
View ArticleThe Eastwood Index, MLS and Parity
IntroductionI showed in my last post how Major League Soccer (MLS) is a much more closely matched league than the English Premier League (EPL), with the wage cap and draft system increasing the parity...
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MLS Player Salaries: 2013
IntroductionThe latest Major League Soccer (MLS) salaries were released recently by the MLS Players’ Union so I thought I would post a quick summary of the data.Average Salary By TeamThe first thing I...
View ArticleEI Match Probabilities for the English Premier League
We have finally reached the end of the season so for the last time in 2012-2013 here are the Eastwood Index’s (EI) probabilities for the English Premier League.Once the season is over and done with...
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Did The Eastwood Index Beat The Bookmakers?
IntroductionIt’s the end of the season so it’s time to review how the Eastwood Index performed over the year and how it compared with the bookmakers.Ranked Probability ScoresOne of the most important...
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Betting With The Eastwood Index And Kelly Criterion
IntroductionI demonstrated in my last post that the odds calculated using the Eastwood Index were slightly more accurate than the bookmakers over the course of the football season. My next goal is to...
View ArticleAnouncement
IntroductionYou may have noticed that my blogging has slowed down over the past few weeks and the reason is that I have joined Onside Analysis as a computational statistician.I am really excited about...
View ArticleAnalysing Football Teams Using Cluster Analysis and Principal Component Analysis
IntroductionThe amount of football data available is growing rapidly – with every passing week of the season more matches are played and even more data gets collected. This is great as it allows us to...
View ArticleUEFA Champions League – Route To The Final
IntroductionWith the UEFA Champions League group stage now underway I took a quick look at what it typically takes for teams to reach the final.I started off by looking at how well teams from the major...
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EPL 2013/2014: Football Pythagorean So Far
IntroductionWelome back! Now that I'm no longer part of Onside Analysis I'm free to start blogging again so let's start off by taking a look at how my football Pythagorean is doing for the English...
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Comparing Players Using Cluster Analysis
IntroductionAs there were a couple of presentations at the recent Opta Pro Forum talking about identifying player similarities I thought I’d give a quick example of how to do something similar using...
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Expected Goals For All
IntroductionIt seems that everybody has their own expected goals models for football nowadays but they all seem to be top secret and all appear to give different results so I thought I post a quick...
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Actual Goals Versus Expected Goals
IntroductionSince my last article about how to calculate expected goals one question has come up more than any other and that is about the correlation between expected goals and actual goals so here...
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Expected Goals Updated
IntroductionWhen I introduced my Expected Goals model a few weeks back a number of people commented on the bump in the curve where I had included penalty shots in the data set used to fit the model....
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English Premier League Pythagorean Update
IntroductionI’ve not posted an update on the Pythagorean for the English Premier League (EPL) for a while so the latest figures are below.Football PythagoreanIn case you haven’t seen it before, my...
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Expected Goals: The Y Axis
IntroductionExpected goals are one of the hot topics in the football analytics community at the moment and it’s a topic I’ve previously written a number of articles discussing how to calculate them. If...
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Expected Goals And Exponential Decay
IntroductionIn my last article on expected goals I showed how to incorporate the distance from goal along the Y axis into the expected goal model using Pythagoras' Thereom.This all worked pretty well,...
View ArticleMathematically Optimising Your Fantasy Football Team
IntroductionThe Premier League Fantasy Football is back ready for the new season so I thought I’d run through an example of how linear programming can help you select your team. If you haven’t come...
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Expected Goals: Foot Shots Versus Headers
IntroductionMy last article on expected goals introduced the concept of using exponential decay to estimate the probability of scoring based on the shooter’s distance from the goal. The article...
View ArticlePredicting Football Using R
I recently gave a presentation to the Manchester R Users' Group discussing how to predict football results using R. My presentation gave a brief overview of how to create a Poisson model in R and apply...
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English Premier League Pythagorean
I’ve not posted this for a while so here is the latest Pythagorean for the English Premier League.Football PythagoreanIf you’ve seen this before, it’s an adaptation of the baseball Pythagorean that...
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Massey Ratings For Football Part One
IntroductionWe all know the league table can lie and one of the common causes of this is strength of schedule. Take Southampton, at the time of writing they are currently second in the Premier League...
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Massey Ratings For Football Part Two
IntroductionIn part one I introduced Massey Ratings and how they can be used to rank football teams in a way that accounts for their strength of schedule. Next, we’ll take a look at how Massey Ratings...
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