20 August 2017. It’s Tottenham Hotspur versus Chelsea at the Wembley. Chelsea center-back David Luiz wins a foul close to the Tottenham penalty area around the 23rd minute, and wing-back Marcos Alonso steps up to take the free-kick. He fires it into the top-right corner of the net, and it’s 1-0 to Chelsea. In the 82nd minute, however, Chelsea substitute Michy Batshuayi heads the ball into his own goal and makes it 1-1.
Continue reading Marcos Alonso Is Unique
SD Eibar, the smallest club in La Liga which consistently punches above its weight, are currently sitting pretty at 8th in the Spanish La Liga table. The club from a town of 27,000 people in the Basque country, which play at the little Ipurua Stadium, have been putting on some dazzling displays this season under the Basque manager José Luis Mendilibar.
Continue reading SD Eibar: Unique, Thrilling, and Fascinating
There are many approaches to visualising shot location data. It can be tricky finding the right balance between the amount of information on display and the ease of use or intuitiveness. There is a plethora of categories and subcategories that can be considered such as the player taking the shot, the danger of the shot and whether the shot resulted in a goal.
Continue reading Exploring the uses of clustering: Individual Shot Cluster Zones
This is part two of a two-part series explaining how Lucien Favre’s Nice overperform expected goals, that cool new stat they show on MOTD, by a huge margin. Part one explained how Nice’s defence overperform expected goals against (xGA). In part two, I explain how Nice’s attack overperform expected goals for (xGF). Let’s jump right in.
Continue reading How in the World Does Nice Overperform Expected Goals? Part Two: The Attack
The award of a penalty brings the expectation among fans of a goal, but what does the data tell us about the specific probabilities of success?
Part one of a two-part series. Here’s part two.
After a strong season under Claude Puel in 2016, finishing 4th, Nice got even stronger under the control of Swiss manager Lucien Favre, finishing 3rd in Ligue 1 and securing a Champions League qualifying berth in 2017. However, as a (self-professed) stats guy, I like to look at Expected Goals – soccer analytics’ most popular model – to see if the league table lies.
Continue reading How in the World Does Nice Overperform Expected Goals? Part One: The Defence
I’m not sure if someone has already written about this or not. If you have, credit to you!
This article assumes an understanding of the flagship metric of the analytics movement xG (Expected Goals). I would advise reading this, this, and this if you are not familiar with the concept.
