The Question: why are Liverpool struggling to score at home? | Jonathan Wilson

Liverpool's scoring record at Anfield has been poor but those who blame bad luck and Andy Carroll may be missing the point Liverpool sit a reasonably contented sixth in the table . They have conceded fewer goals than anybody else in the Premier League and, although a gap of 11 points to the leaders is probably too much to make up, there is no reason why they shouldn't mount a strong challenge to qualify for the Champions League.

Don't normally put stock in transfer rumors, but it's a slow week and this story has legs.

Blackburn boss Steve Kean expects the green light to bid for unhappy Fulham striker Andy Johnson on Wednesday and make him one of the first signings of the winter transfer window.

Kean is due to meet Rovers director Vineeth Rao on his return from a summit with owners Venky's to secure the cash to carry out the £2million swoop.

Don't normally put stock in transfer rumors, but it's a slow week and this story has legs.

Blackburn boss Steve Kean expects the green light to bid for unhappy Fulham striker Andy Johnson on Wednesday and make him one of the first signings of the winter transfer window.

Kean is due to meet Rovers director Vineeth Rao on his return from a summit with owners Venky's to secure the cash to carry out the £2million swoop.

Featured image: Paul Rudderow

When I was gathering the season stats for all of the Philadelphia Union players to share with the PSP writers for our forthcoming 2011 season review series I realized no passing stats were available, either for the club or for individual players. Actually, that's not precisely true; you can find passing percentages for the team on a game-by-game basis by clicking on the Stat tab for each game's MatchCenter page at MLSsoccer.

Finally confirmed out for the season after a day filled with rumors, it's incredibly hard to forecast what Liverpool will do without Lucas. He's missed just three of Dalglish's 39 matches: rested for two, suspended for one. Since 2009, he's missed so few games that it's statistically irrelevant posting win-loss percentages with and without the player: he appeared in 34 of 38 league games in '10-11 and 35 of 38 in '09-10.

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.

By Nathan Hildred

In the past few years, the long-running Football Manager series has been more revolutionary than evolutionary. We've seen the advent of the 3D match engine, touchline shouts and Match Analysis that would make even the blokes over at Opta sweat.

We all understand that agents, and indeed all middle people, are leeches on the sport of football, grabbing their inflated percentages while skirting between the black and grey markets, bribing and threatening people and corrupting the game.
They force players to adhere to certain match data as basic sabermetrics measures the obvious, they enter into third party arrangements and other forms of disguised dual ownership of players to confuse both the footballing authorities and the tax regime, they control aspects of the media sometimes psychopathically so, and many persuade players to underperform so that insider gambles may be achieved on what the fan thinks is an authentic football match.

Photo: Earl Gardner

The Union midfield has been called one of the weaker parts of the team this season. What does the data suggest though? Specifically, I wanted to answer two questions about the midfield: How does the midfield fare in terms of passing percentages? And are better midfield passing percentages associated with Union wins?

Photo: Paul Rudderow

In the past two home games, the Philadelphia Union recorded 42 attempts on goal—including 13 shots on goal, 18 shots off target and 11 blocked shots. They also had 12 corner kicks, 46 open play crosses, a duels won percentage of 52.5, completed 691 of 892 passes for a passing accuracy of 77.

It's still hard to grasp how the Revs didn't get absolutely obliterated in their last two games.

Despite being outshot, outplayed, and generally outclassed on the whole by a mediocre D.C. United, the Revs miraculously clinched their first road victory of the 2011 season last Wednesday thanks to an opportunistic Stephen McCarthy header.

Lately I've been spending a lot of time hunched over my laptop, working on sprawling spreadsheets stacked with strange abbreviations, lots of numbers and percentages, and neatly colored rows (I like to keep things organized). This has been my response to last Saturday's disheartening home loss to the Portland Timbers as well as my attempt at figuring out just what is wrong with the Fire and whether or not Sebastián Grazzini is the answer.

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).

Scoring Stats The true value of Ronaldo and Messi - originally posted on Soccerlens.com

Any statistical analysis of a sporting event can go down one of two main routes. Firstly, they could be raw data, usually expressed as totals or percentages. In football, examples include the number of total corners a team concedes (or forces), the number of minutes a player is on the park for over the course of a season or even how many points a team accumulates.

There's a great Japanese movie I watched several times in the dorms in college. It was simply called Ping Pong and it was about Ping Pong (surprise!). It was the first time I had ever heard the word skunk used as a verb, and it meant when your opponent completely dominates you in a shutout or lopsided victory.

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.

It's widely suggested that Carlos Tevez will start tonight's game on the bench, so with him absent for part of the game at least, who is Manchester City's dangerman this evening?

Tevez aside, Mario Balotelli attracts most of the attention, but it could be City's only January signing who provides the main threat tonight.

So French football was hit with something of a scandal last year with the whole 'underage hooker' thing and a few of its higher profile players. Only a few, if that, which rose to the surface. And granted, architectural Europe is not lacking for women in the nude in any way, therefore the percentages of such are significantly greater than elsewhere.

This week's column:
Climbing the Ladder: How bad a red card hurts
How many goals per 90 will it cost your team to go down a man?
And I already realized that I missed the RSL-Columbus series for the article's second point, about drawing the away leg of the CCL first. Doh.

This week's column:
Climbing the Ladder: How MLS teams rank by age
Features a list of the team ages so far this season. Interesting to see that the most foreign and most domestic teams, NY & SJ, are the two oldest so far this season.
Previous Columns

• March 9 - Champs usually start hot
• March 16 - Home-field advantage
• March 23 - Hidden milestones of Week 1
• April 1 - Playing percentages by nationality
• April 6 - Dixon and the Name Game
• April 13 - Winning PK shootouts

This week's column:
Climbing the Ladder: Winning PK shootouts
If the CCL final goes to one, everything is pointing to RSL having a great chance (knock on wood).
Previous Columns

• March 9 - Champs usually start hot
• March 16 - Home-field advantage
• March 23 - Hidden milestones of Week 1
• April 1 - Playing percentages by nationality
• April 6 - Dixon and the Name Game
  

Here's a different way of looking at positive leverage. In the spirit of analyses that have looked at teams' ability to generate and take advantage of chances in a match, it's a way to identify teams that both generate positive leverage situations and manage to, well, leverage them for a win.
Here's what the graphs show.

Here's a different way of looking at positive leverage. In the spirit of analyses that have looked at teams' ability to generate and take advantage of chances in a match, it's a way to identify teams that both generate positive leverage situations and manage to, well, leverage them for a win.
Here's what the graphs show.

Link:
Climbing the Ladder: Dixon and The Name Game
This week, I looked at the significance of Houston Dynamo academy signing Alex Dixon's debut, as well as a few more notes on the Champions League and the Rapids' excellent start. Check it out!
Previous Columns

• March 9 - Champs usually start hot
• March 16 - Home-field advantage
• March 23 - Hidden milestones of Week 1
• April 1 - Playing percentages by nationality
  

Written by Gooner in Exile

I read with interest Craig Bellamy's comments before the England Wales game the other week. Although I don't like the irritating little bugger I thought this quote may shine some light on our recent performances.

"Are England players scared?

New MLSsoccer.com column. Didn't get published on the normal day this week, so you might have missed it:
Climbing the Ladder: Playing percentages by nationality
I'll probably go back and figure out the rest of the years in the near future, though it can be tricky as certain players have changed nationalities (like Jeff Cunningham, domestic since 2002 but foreign before).

I was hoping a draw will be a good result but it was not to be. Both teams had a number of key players missing. Wenger sent a mixture of first team players and second stringers to play in their usual style while Ferguson sent a similar group out with a clear plan. In the end the man with the plan won, once again.

As much of an issue as we've had winning away from home in the Premier League in this very un-Manchester United-like season, by comparison, we would appear to be a veritable juggernaut continentally.

Okay, that would be a stretch of the truth if you've seen any of those matches, but the bare fact is that we had as many wins in three Champions League group stage away matches as we've had in four times as many away matches in the Premier League.

Who imports soccer players? Turns out, the leagues most dependent on foreign labor aren't necessarily the obvious ones. Here's a nifty graph from The Economist, showing the percentages and absolute numbers of foreign players in each league. These data come from a report released by the Professional Football Players Observatory, an academic research group.

Seeing the above scoreline still makes for strange reading several days later, doesn't it?

It was inevitable that, if Manchester United continued to put themselves in precarious positions on a regular basis, it would come back to bite them eventually.

Last Saturday marked the 10th time in 25 Premier League matches that United had taken a lead and then allowed the opposition to equalize, with six of those occurrences coming away from Old Trafford.

Technology is so advanced that not like a number of a long time in the past one does not have to wait for "the news" to get an update on any sporting event. Other than stay protection on tv there are internet sites devoted completely to the event. Spotmau Powersuite protects users from data loss in the event of a crash.

An interesting study was published yesterday on a number of categories in relation to European clubs several hundred European clubs. The surprise wasn't so much in those topping their respective categories, but the simple fact that so many are high-profile, elite European clubs.

* Barcelona have, on average, the shortest team in Europe
* Manchester United have the most stable squad
* European champions Inter Milan have the oldest squad
* Tottenham Hotspur have more active internationals than any other club on the continent

Wouldn't it seem more likely, if only by percentages, that some random second division club from Malta would have the continent's oldest club?

One facet of this season I've found to be a bit peculiar is the seeming lack of narrative. Usually by this point in the season the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.

For me, last year was all about Europe. The year before, we watched and wondered about what Roy could do with his first full season at the helm.

Amongst the many tests done during yesterday's physicals is the body fat percentage measurement, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The average percentages amongst athletes vary depending on the sport - long distance runners versus football linemen, for example. In soccer, they tend to be on the lower side.

Reports are starting to emerge that Gareth Bale will switch from the North of London to the North of Italy with Juventus, Inter Milan and AC Milan all rumoured to make a bids in June...

This is a statement that Gareth Bales Agent, Peppino Tirri, released to Italian publication ilsussidiario:

"I confirm interest of Juventus but certainly not talking about June of January.