Chris Sherman looks at the impact of short rest on performance. He also looks at whether MLS schedules favor home teams with longer rest and if that could impact home field advantage.
Chris Sherman continues to investigate potential causes for home field advantage in MLS using statistical analysis. This second article demonstrates home field advantage and studies the effect of the size of the home crowd on the home team's advantage.
Chris Sherman investigates potential causes for home field advantage in MLS using statistical analysis. The first article demonstrates home field advantage and studies the effect of distance traveled on said advantage.
It's close enough to the quarter pole for me to feel justified in looking at numbers. Wanna fight about it?
Life comes at you fast. I kept putting off MLS Statistical Analysis for the first part of the season, and putting it off, and putting it off... until it became the end of the MLS season and I was getting married.
Most MLS teams have played four games, with the others having played just three, but far be it from me to resist the pull of analyzing the stats for the season to this point and drawing grand conclusions from small sample sizes. It's MLS Statistical Analysis, back for 2013.
For those who haven't seen it before, it's my (possibly) exhaustive look at the league's offenses, defenses, and goalkeeping through numbers, with a special emphasis on D.
Before we get started: If you haven't already, do yourself a favor and lope on over to Tempo Free Soccer and poke around. Alex Olshanksy is doing man's work with statistical analysis there, and if you want to be a smarter, better human, the choice is obvious. In depth statistical analysis has a home in soccer in the same way it has a home in baseball.
Editor's note: The MLS partnership with Opta Sports has resulted in richer ways to
understand the performance of the Philadelphia Union and its players through statistical analysis.
PSP's efforts to collect and share match statistics have been enhanced by the deeper analysis
offered by Ford Bohrmann.
It was rough being a Sounder's fan last night. Â Amidst discussions of a CONCACAF Champions
League curse, playing at altitude and missing one of their best players of the season in Mauro
Rosales, the Sounders had a tough playoff matchup against Real Salt Lake. Â While most fans would
have been surprised if the Sounders had come away with a first leg lead, going down 3-0 was a bit
of a shock.
We're about one third of the way through the season, so it seems like a good time to look at how D.C. United's players are performing. It's no secret that the way the team closed out the 2016 regular season hasn't carried over to 2017. Injuries to players that were vital to 2016's stretch run, such as Patrick Mullins, Steve Birnbaum, Nick DeLeon, and Patrick Nyarko have played a big part, but it's not the only reason for the struggles.
For D.C. United, it can't get much worse than last year.
Statistical Analysis is back for 2014, starting with a look back at 2013 as a whole. Very quickly, if you've never read this before, it's a look at various offensive, defensive, and goalkeeping statistics for all teams, as well as D.C.
Pt. 1 Brief statistical analysis of strongly linked centreback targets & Arsenal's current centrebacks by AidanGooner Of course, different teams will have different amounts of defending required, so I have got the stats for one/two of their team-mates to look at for comparison. Mehdi Benatia & Jerome Boateng & Holger Badstuber (below) 11 Bundesliga starts [.
The famous adage that "football is a funny old game" is very true. Not many would have predicted that Aston Villa would get a 3-1 win over Arsenal at the weekend or believed that Wigan would beat Manchester City in the FA Cup final last year. However, more often than not, with careful analysis and an insightful approach, you can make informed decisions when pursuing betting tips around the beautiful game.
The modern game demands many things of its footballers: Physicality, touch, technique and dynamism to name but a few. But often overlooked are the attributes of versatility and tactical flexibility.
The immersive statistical analysis that's now available at the touch of a button has channeled the game towards a host of different philosophies and as such, managers are more reactive than ever in their approach to games; a style that is currently in vogue amongst the very best teams.
Meet The Minnows: A statistical analysis of Europe's Whipping Boys is a post from: Just
Football
Okay so they're bad, but just how bad? Making his debut for Just Football
here's Jake Miller with a statistical analysis of UEFA's minnows.
During the last round of qualifiers for next summer's European Championships in Poland and
Ukraine, the world's number one ranked team, Holland stuffed perennial losers
San Marino 11-0.
Three games into the Premier League season, the distinctive sound of burning pitchforks is in
the air. Without a win from the six matches that they have played between them, both Andre Villa
Boas and Brendan Rodgers are already being cast into a familiar mould that of the hapless
managerial failure.
Xavi, Pirlo, Carrick, Modric... A Tactical And Statistical Analysis of Deep-Lying Playmakers in
2011-12 is a post from: Just Football
With the death of the traditional number 10 many of Europe's top sides have looked to other
areas of the pitch for the creative spark, which has seen the rise of the ‘inverted forward' or
‘inverted play-maker,' who dictates the play from wider positions.
"It's not about results, it's about entertainment," says Sam Allardyce. Pause a moment to take that
in. The man often portrayed as the ultimate no-frills manager announcing that, actually, he quite
fancies frills and thrills. Except that's not exactly what he's saying. Because it is clear that,
for Allardyce, entertainment has always meant getting good results and getting good results means
entertainment.
The study of football, and its players, is perhaps best accomplished by evaluating efficiency.
Of course there are many methods of such evaluation – ranging from weekly player ratings on the
typical "start at 6" scale to full scale statistical analysis.
In this article we look at football clubs in Europe's top four leagues the English Premiership,
La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga and analyse their offensive and defensive efficiency so far
this season.
The international break provides a good opportunity for statistical analysis of various teams
and players. To begin with, let's look at macro level stats for the big six. I will also try to
cover some player comparisons before Premiership resumes on the 19th.
The following table lists passing, dueling, and other figures for Arsenal, City, United,
Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham.
I've never been a great fan of Boardroom directors and owners at soccer clubs that
pretend to know the game and how to run a football club, and probably more so since the advent of
the "Super Owners" who bring colossal amounts of money into a club to radically transform the
playing staff almost overnight, so it is with a certain level of enjoyment that I'm watching
developments at Ewood Park, Blackburn, as the club struggles to get themselves off the bottom of
the English Premier League.
The CIES Football Observatory has predicted based on their analysis of football, that Chelsea are
the most probable side to win the Premier League this season. The CIES was set up in 2005 and is
dedicated to the statistical analysis of sport in all its diversity. Their team of researchers is
notably specialised in the demographic study of the footballers' labour market, performance
analysis of team and player levels, as well as in the elaboration of predictive models to determine
the outcome of competitions.
Numbers don't always tell the story, and no truer words can be spoken about Saturday night's
victory over Vancouver. While the final score indicated a lopsided affair, a quick glance at the
stat sheet doesn't seem quite as convincing.
New England scored four goals in a match for the first time since last September, and in the
process racked up some pretty impressive numbers in the stat sheets.
Lahm, Dani Alves, Marcelo, Assou-Ekotto... A Statistical Analysis of Europe's Attacking
Full-Backs is a post from: Just Football
In the past, a full-back's traditional role was to defend from wide positions, track opposition
wingers and prevent crosses coming into the box. However over recent years the role has evolved to
be almost more an attacking position than a defensive one.
If you are interested in the science of sabermetrics - be it from the 'Moneyball' tales of Billy
Beane and Bill James, or of Damien Comolli's interest in recreating the same in football - you'll
like this article by Neil Ashton on Comolli, sabermetrics, and what's gone wrong at Liverpool.
When the trend for sending statistical analysis to managers on a Monday morning began, Kenny
Dalglish filed them in the bin.
AnfieldIndex Liverpool FC Stats | Liverpool FC Blog | Liverpool FC Forum As Jordan Henderson
left the field in the 61 st minute against Sunderland, Lucas Leiva would have been excused for
breathing a sigh of relief. The heat is off, a new whipping boy is in town.
Last year in a 2-part "tactical preview" I suggested that the true shape of a "back four" team
is actually a "W", taking into consideration the prevalence of the deep-lying central defensive
midfielder, who in many applications has become almost a 3rd center back and revised the famous
"libero" role of the past.
Football Manager: Advanced Stats, Live Odds and Scouting+ - originally posted on
Soccerlens.com
Football Manager will be released on 21 October 20112 here's a look at how Miles Jacobson
and co. can make the game even better for the millions of football fans who religiously play the
game every year.
What a difference a week makes. A week ago I wrote about the young heart of the Sounders and
this week, two of those players are now Impactioneers. (Hey, it sounds better than Impacters.) Much
has been said in the aftermath of The Trade. But one comment in particular struck
a chord for me.
File this one under the category: most likely to attract choice commentary from Seattle Sounders
supporters.
As the Sounders-less MLS First Kick fast approaches, we here at Stumptown Footy are spooling up
the statistical analysis drives in preparation for the 2012 campaign. Lacking much in the way of
hard data so far, with just one preseason match under our belt, we've decided to start with the
schedule.
With the start of the 2013 MLS season around the corner, hopefully you've joined the B&RU Fantasy League (private league number 7173-1471 -- now go thee forth and join!) Of course, you're probably reading this because you want a little insight into who the players are that you should consider adding to your team, so let's dive into it.
After nearly seven seasons of soccer played by the Houston Dynamo, we've started to accumulate
enough data to begin looking at statistical trends. I've never been a big statistics guy myself,
unless we're discussing baseball, simply because applying statistics to a game like soccer is
difficult. Sure it can provide some interesting information, fancy graphs and some data trends, but
it's very difficult to make broader term assumptions about the game or teams because the sport is
in such an ever changing state.
This is the problem with using econometric analysis to identify causes within complex systems.
Yes, Kuper and Syzmanski are able to identify a few 10,000 foot correlations that are fairly
intuitive to begin with. But when the real work to identify the actual causes of something begins,
the equations and models are revealed to be cartoon depictions of reality bolstered by some smart
sounding phrases but demonstrating a frightening lack of subject knowledge depth.
I have uploaded the spreadsheets that I use to calculate the CONCACAF club and league coefficients
to the public FTP site of my company, Soccermetrics Research & Consulting. I am using this site to
host my publicly-available software projects, and while the the spreadsheets aren't software per
se, they do represent one of my early projects when I was getting started in statistical analysis
in soccer and they do attract interest from fans and other analysts.
