While the FM database let me down a bit with United's new Brazilian trialist, Alfredo, it
appears to have a more fully-realized take on another forward trialist: youth US Nat Stefan Jerome.
Though not all of his stats are defined in the database, most are, and that's enough to provide us
a reasonable picture of where he's at now.
I HATE HIMLiverpool face Man Utd at Old Trafford on Saturday lunch-time in what
may look like a daunting task, to earn points away at the Manchester venue.
On paper, it seems a difficult job to get anything from the game, but I believe Liverpool are in
the right frame of mind to gain at least a point, if not all three against Ferguson's creaking
side.
I HATE HIMLiverpool face Man Utd at Old Trafford on Saturday lunch-time in what
may look like a daunting task, to earn points away at the Manchester venue.
On paper, it seems a difficult job to get anything from the game, but I believe Liverpool are in
the right frame of mind to gain at least a point, if not all three against Ferguson's creaking
side.
With Liverpool facing Harry Rednapp's Spurs next Monday night,
statistics over the years show that Liverpool have the edge over Tottenham in the Primiership down
the years as shown in the graph below.
However, in the last three games between the two sides its Spurs who are on top with a thumping 4-0
beating of Liverpool, preceded
by a 2-0 defeat at Anfield last May.
Now that the January transfer window is closed, clubs are gearing up to be ready for the rest of
the season. For promoted clubs in particular, the Premiership adventure has entered the second -
and possibly last - half of the season. Whether they will be able to continue their adventure is
anyone's guess, but judging from the league table, Norwich and Swansea look to be in a good
position to stay up.
With the pressure and excitement of each and every week's matches, it's sometimes easy to lose the
overall plot of how a season has evolved in the league as a whole. Since we are just past the
halfway point of the season, I thought I'd take a look at a couple of trends in teams' output in
the Premier League this season.
Now that the transfer window is open, I thought it was time to take a quick look at how Premier
League clubs have been performing on various dimensions. Let's start with offense for today. Which
clubs have been doing exceptionally well, and which ones seem to need some help, perhaps by finding
a player or two?
SPANISH SPORTS papers become creative during the Xmas Break as Football "stops" but the selling of
papers continue. One inventive daily is Barcelona based "Sport" which comes up with interesting
content, this case, an info-graph dedicated to FC BARCELONA crack ANDRES INIESTA. The diagram is in
Spanish but I believe it is intuitive enough for non-Spanish readers to get the gist.
Here's an amazing interactive data visualization from Andy Kriebel's beautiful VizWiz blog. Click
on the graph to go to the real thing. Enjoy!
With the hectic Christmas period fast approaching, I thought it was time to assess our performances
to date in the Premier League and the Carling Cup to date.
We have played 17 games so far this season, winning ten, drawing 5 and losing only 2.
Reasonable results by any standard.
What is obvious to everyone is the fact that we are not converting enough of our chances into goals
and wins.
Hard to believe, but roughly one third of this year's Premier League season has been played
already, and some clubs are starting to look over their shoulder with a nagging worry. They're
looking at their current squad and manager, and they wonder: is it enough? Will we make it?
Sunderland's Steve Bruce is this year's first managerial sacking, surely brought on by a lack of
results, but also a niggling fear of not surviving in the Premiership.
United Rant previews tonight's game against Benfica.
Surreal Football shows a graph of feelings between United fans and Wayne Rooney.
MUFC Info has stats ahead of our game against Benfica.
The Express talks about Danny Welbeck's new contract.
The Daily Mail has pictures of Phil Jones' new Aston Martin.
Blocked shots don't typically make the highlight reel. Of course, they don't, you might say -
they're a non-event. Well, they are, and they aren't. They're an event that wasn't of much
consequence in the scheme of things. But they are still "events" in the way that that the good
folks at companies like Opta think about them.
Graph City, Arizona.
I looked at Dickson's games for us over the last four seasons and divided the matches according
to the pre-match odds of a Fulham win. This was a bit arbitrary, but the half in which Fulham were
shortest odds were designated "easy", the half where odds were longer were designated "hard".
Yeah, my power's been out. Curse you, October blizzard.
Remember when I said attendance was good this year? I was wrong. It was great. Record
shattering, in fact. Enough to surpass the NBA and NHL, in fact. Seriously. After sixteen years, we
have beaten not only our own record set in 1996, but those of other leagues against whom we're
compared.
SPANISH FOOTBALL looks like leading the Social Media area as well as World Football. A
comprehensive study of "followers" on the two currently leading "Social Media" channels ( Facebook
& Twitter) gives Spanish Football Clubs FC BARCELONA & REAL MADRID as the most popular Sporting
teams on the planet.
By FRANCO PANIZO
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. - After four training sessions in two days, the U.S. men's national team
returned the practice field on a cool Thursday evening finally able to do one thing: Focus on
Honduras.
Having been recovering from weekend games and with their upcoming friendly against the Catrachos
getting closer, the Americans went through a 90-minute session in which every player aside from
Nick Rimando (who is not yet in camp) participated.
The blog has been quiet for a few days, and for a reason. I´ve been busy working on a little side
project. Before too long, I´ll tell you more about that, but one of the things that have come of
out of it has been a more detailed look at various performance indicators across leagues with
better and more recent data.
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.
After Wigan lost to Manchester City last March, Wigan manager Roberto Martinez told the press that
City stopped Wigan's momentum with fouls: "City used their experience," the Wigan manager said.
"There were a lot of technical fouls every time we got into attack situations. Micah Richards
should have seen a straight red for his tackle on Tom Cleverley, but the overall number of fouls
shows how the game went.
Staggering data from a report in the Daily Mail today (never one to forego a scaremongering story).
They have mapped the current economic mess onto previous crashes to show how long it took to
recover each time.
As you can see this current crash is on course to be the longest in history...
A few days ago, I wrote about different ways of measuring a team's performance - either in absolute
or relative terms. Relative metrics are useful if we are interested in drilling a little deeper
into what players or teams are able to do, given the resources they have or in relation to some
other event on the pitch, not simply whether they do a lot or a little (like scoring or possessing
the ball).
According to a report from Business Insider on MLS spending, the Philadephia Union are tenth in
salary for the 2011 season.
The numbers that Business Insider used are probably from the beginning of the season, when
former striker Carlos Ruiz was still on the Union's payroll. A graph within the article lists the
Union at $3.
(Graph via Business Insider)
Business Insider had this nifty graphic up on a post today about spending in MLS and how it has
gone up. The article also talks about attendance being on the rise as well but for me this was all
about each club's spending.
The league is slowly getting there and will only continue to get better as long as owners pony
up the cash for players here.
Just for kicks, here's a slightly different way of looking at clubs' offensive production over the
course of a decade. A few things of note:
- Only a few clubs consistently stand out; among them: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester
United
- A few clubs are consistent also-rans: Aston Villa, Everton, Tottenham
- Clubs on the rise: Everton, Manchster City, Tottenham
- Clubs on the decline: Blackburn, Newcastle
- Clubs that consistently perform well but not spectacularly: Bolton, Everton, Fulham
To me, the graph also demonstrates nicely what a great achievement it is to be a consistently high
performing club.
In anticipation of an opening weekend of great football, I thought it'd be fun to take a quick look
at fouls committed in the Premier League last year. Who fouled the most and the least?* Take a
look.
Spurs led the league with the smallest number of fouls called per match at 9.5; at the high end,
Bolton were called for infractions an average of 12.
I've previously written about home field advantage in football. While there's no shortage of debate
about the actual source of the home field advantage by learned and and not so learned minds alike,
the facts are straightforward: home field advantage is a statistical fact. Across the big leagues
of European football, more matches end with the home team winning than end with any other outcome
(away win or draw).
During the past year, I have compared teams across the Big 4 leagues (Bundesliga, EPL, La Liga,
Serie A) with regard to various performance indicators. With the Bundesliga about to get underway
tonight, I thought it'd be interesting to see where they all ended up by the end of the season, and
to find out what we may expect for next year.
In the next installment of "what happened last season in the Premier League?", here are season
totals on teams' defensive prowess. Much has been made of Arsenal's inability to defend well and
its need to improve defense during this transfer window. But the numbers tell a slightly different
story - at least in part.
Over the last couple of days, I've been doing some work on my databases for the last few years'
worth of league play. In the process, I've come across some interesting patterns that I thought
were worth sharing. One of them was simply the distribution of full time results in the Premier
League last year.
It's that time of year again when I start going through my data from last year to make sure
everything is up to date and accurate before the new season begins. In the (tedious) process of
coding and cleaning data sets, I try to have a little fun and benchmark a couple of things for the
upcoming campaign.
Although some of this information is elsewhere on this blog in other form, by popular demand in
response to the earlier post, here are the
total number of (Guardian Chalkboards/Opta
defined) goals from fast breaks (first graph), as well as the
ratio of fast break goals to all
goals (second graph) for last season (2010/11).
I've been looking for a positive way to say goodbye to Blackpool who were relegated after playing a
single spirited and entertaining season in the Premier League. So here's my swan song for the
Tangerines.
Corners are neither the most common nor the most efficient way to score. But as it turns out, Ian
Holloway's men were the season's Corner Kings.
In this first part of Carlos Ruiz According To Heat Graphs, the Brotherly Game introduces every
heat graph from games that MLS has on MLSsoccer.com. The heat graphs are part of MLS' new
Chalkboards on its Matchcenter section of MLSsoccer.com.
Each heat graph's coloring shows the locations where a player is for lengths of time during a
game.
By
Ian Graham*
I have been following
Soccer By The Numbers for a while, and I usually love the articles
Chris writes. I took a professional interest in his article on the Uselessness of Free Kicks in the
Premier League: While we were developing the Castrol Rankings, we looked at free kicks and came to
the conclusion that winning a free kick increased a team's chance of scoring a goal.
By Chris Wright
Bit of a puzzler here, but it seems highly likely that Liverpool are on the cusp of wrapping up
a deal for Sunderland midfielder Jordan Henderson, with a fee just short of £20 million being
mooted by several of today's newspapers.
The Telegraph are reporting that Liverpool had a £16 million bid for Henderson rejected over
the weekend and are set to return to the table with a bid somewhere just shy of the £20 million
mark at some point tomorrow which, fairly understandably, the paper reckon is a bid that Sunderland
would be rather foolish to turn down.
Occasionally, there's a debate among fans just how far soccer has come in the United States. It's
clearly more popular than ever, and the country now boasts a league that, according to some scouts,
is on par with the English Championship (Division 2). Another way to chart the progress of soccer
in the U.
If you've been reading this blog these last few weeks, you know that I've been spending way too
much time digging through data on shot creation in the Premier League with the help of the
Opta/Guardian chalkboards. But I can't quite help myself, so here's yet another installment; this
time it's on the (relative) uselessness of free kicks.
A few days ago, I took a look at the origins of goals in the first half of this year's Premier
League season to see what we can learn about the connection between different match situations
(defined as open play, corners, fast breaks, penalties, and free kicks) and goal creation.
In case you didn't have the time or inclination to read the details, here's the upshot: Keeping in
mind that teams scored on average 1.
