Haven't had much time these past few days to do much in terms of detailed analyses, so here's just a fun (ok, "fun for geeks") graph of efficiency ratios (accuracy and conversion) for teams in the big 4 leagues during the 2010/11 season. Accuracy is defined as the ratio of accurate shots to all shots created; conversion is the ratio of goals to accurate shots.

Time for some attendance numbers for you attendance geeks out there. The Sports Business Daily released current attendance figures to date in comparison to this time last season. As expected the league has enjoyed a 6.3% raise in folks at the gate with only five clubs seeing negative percentages (The Union are one of those teams in the negative and its largely due to them playing their first two games at the Linc in Philly).

Soccer stats tend to fall into two categories. There are the stats that are easy for the casual fan-slash-statistician to observe and tally, but which are almost hopelessly uninformative. That would include goals, assists, minutes played, and so on. Then there are the stats that provide significantly more insight but due to the continuous nature of the game take dedicated resources to measure.

In the kindest way possible, Opta is a soccer geeks dream-come-true. The sports data company headquartered in London is the hub of statistical data that is provided to companies worldwide. It is the engine that drives so much of the data to Sky...
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PGE Park in Portland: what it will look like if you peeled the roof away

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I've got a piece coming out early this week in SI.