In his excellent piece on Everton’s failed recruitment strategy (paywalled), Oliver Kay of the Athletic makes an interesting point – that players seldom do well when they move from a bigger club to a smaller club. During his time in charge at Arsenal, George Graham used to say that the key to building a team was…
Liverpool FC: Mid Season Review
After 20 games played, Liverpool are sitting pretty on top of the Premier League with 58 points (out of a possible 60). The only jitter in the campaign so far came in a draw away at Manchester United. I made what I think is a cool graph to put this performance in perspective. I looked…
Spurs right to sack Pochettino?
A few months back, I built my “football club elo by manager” visualisation. Essentially, we take the week-by-week Premier League Elo ratings from ClubElo and overlay it with managerial tenures. A clear pattern emerges – a lot of Premier League sackings have been consistent with clubs going down significantly in terms of Elo Ratings. For…
EPL: Mid-Season Review
Going into the November international break, Liverpool are eight points ahead at the top of the Premier League. Defending champions Manchester City have slipped to fourth place following their loss to Liverpool. The question most commentators are asking is if Liverpool can hold on to this lead. We are two-thirds of the way through the…
Data, football and astrology
Jonathan Wilson has an amusing article on data and football, and how many data-oriented managers in football have also been incredibly superstitious. This is in response to BT Sport’s (one of the UK broadcasters of the Premier League) announcement of it’s “Unscripted” promotion where “some of the world’s foremost experts in both sports and artificial intelligence…
Premier League Points Efficiency
It would be tautological to say that you win in football by scoring more goals than your opponent. What is interesting is that scoring more goals and letting in fewer works across games in a season as well, as data from the English Premier League shows. We had seen an inkling of this last year,…
Football Elo Application
This morning, I discovered the Club Elo Ratings, and promptly proceeded to analyse Liverpool FC’s performance over the years based on these ratings, and then correlated the performance by manager. Then, playing around with the data of different clubs, I realised that there are plenty more stories to be told using this data, and they…
Built by Shanks
This morning, I found this tweet by John Burn-Murdoch, a statistician at the Financial Times, about a graphic he had made for a Simon Kuper (of Soccernomics fame) piece on Jose Mourinho. Burn-Murdoch also helpfully shared the code he had written to produce this graphic, through which I discovered ClubElo, a website that produces chess-style…
English Premier League: Goal Difference to points correlation
So I was just looking down the English Premier League Table for the season, and I found that as I went down the list, the goal difference went lower. There’s nothing counterintuitive in this, but the degree of correlation seemed eerie. So I downloaded the data and plotted a scatter-plot. And what do you have?…
Comparing Goalies in the Premier League: Shot-stopping ability versus passing ability
How does one compare the goalies of the Premier League? Based on Opta data released by Manchester City last year, I have compared the goalkeepers of the 2011-12 season on two parameters – percentage of shots blocked and success in distribution. This shows the relative successes of the goalkeepers in defence and attack respectively. So…
Handling Jesus
A few months back, perhaps during the football world cup, I had talked about the role of Jesus Navas in the Spanish attack. He would mostly be brought on as a “plan B”, mostly when the Spanish tiki-taka failed to break down the opposition defence. And by hogging the right touchline, he would single-handedly offer…
Kabaddi and Jesus Navas
I’ve always talked about the Kabaddi style of solving a problem. In Kabaddi, when you are defending, six out of the seven players in the team form a chain in order to encircle the attacker. The seventh defender, however, strikes it alone, in a different direction, trying to draw the attacker into a position where…
IPL Structuring
I remember that this time, last year, I was eagerly looking forward to the IPL auctions. It also happened to be a time when I was actively looking out for a new job (i wasn’t going to find one till about six months later). And I was secretly hoping that one of the IPL franchises…