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…
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…
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?…
Why is Ten Sports sitting on so many rights?
I wanted to stay up last night. I wanted to stay up and watch the WI-Eng match till the very end. Waking up this morning and checking the scorecard, it seems like it was a really good match. And Fidel Edwards seems to have become a last-day-shutdown specialist. This is the second time this series…
On Being a Geek
I’ve always been a “topper types”. I started topping class when I was in first standard (and no, they didn’t announce ranks before that), and as if that wasn’t enough, my parents made sure that all relatives, and all teachers in school knew about my superhuman arithmetic skills. And as if even this wasn’t enough,…