PSV goal attempts the key this weekend

PSV play Ajax in the Eredivisie’s ‘title decider’ this weekend. It is the match between the Dutch league’s best home team and the club with the fewest away defeats.

Ajax are currently three points ahead of PSV and will travel to Eindhoven with an away record of eight wins, five draws and one defeat. Interestingly, those six failures to pick up maximum points all have something in common. Ajax allowed their opposition to have at least 10 shots on each occasion. This has only happened in one other Ajax away match this season – the 3-2 win at AZ in which the Alkmaar team missed a huge chance to equalise at the death.
You can read the rest of this analysis including a nice Tableau graphic by clicking here

What is analytics? A response to Chris Anderson

The excellent Chris Anderson has posted a blog asking what analytics actually is. This struck me immediately as an important question, particularly given the way that the word has become so overused that it is perhaps difficult for people to know what it refers to. I don’t disagree with what Chris says but I would like to address his piece with my own views.

Later this year, it will be 25 years since I graduated from the then Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) with a degree in Applied Statistics. I don’t think I appreciated how unusual my skills were in the world of the late-1980s and this led to plenty of opportunities in the job market which I am very thankful of.

So, I know a little about analytics because I have been doing it in some form or other for my whole career. It just wasn’t called that at the time. Analytics is just a fancy word for data analysis regardless of the bizarre addition of communication to justify this ‘new’ word. It isn’t as if my career in data analysis didn’t involve the communication of my findings. However, there is a problem as analytics seems to generally be associated with numeric data. I don’t know where this has come from in the period since my graduation and it strikes me as being one of the major obstacles to pushing football analytics forwards.

I spent my early career in market research and later in academia. In neither industry did we treat quantitative and qualitative data as mutually exclusive. Quite the opposite in fact, one supported the other. As an example, the academic research I was involved in dealt with health variations in England and Wales. Having modelled quantitative data to find where potential health extremes appeared to exist, those areas would then be visited and qualitative data collected in order to provide more information on what was actually going on and why those extremes were being observed. Obviously I am simplifying the process massively but you get the idea.

The other thing that the word analytics suggests is that people are doing something very complex. I would argue that that is not the case in general and it also doesn’t need to be, at least at this stage. The data needs to be understood first and, crucially, the numeric data needs to inform the qualitative analysis via, for example, video which is the current analysis method of choice at both clubs and in the media. There may be a time for complexity but it isn’t now.

The sport of football is only complex if you want to analyse all 22 players on the field throughout an entire match but who is even attempting this? Will it ever be relevant to do so? The fact is that much of what happens on a football pitch is irrelevant to its outcome. That is why it is important to begin from first principles when trying to understand it. What happens on the pitch that IS important? How big a role does luck – good or bad – play? Many similar questions are there to be answered. These are not complex but I rarely see them being addressed.

I would therefore like to ask everyone to embrace qualitative AND quantitative analysis. It is very rare that quantitative or qualitative approaches can answer questions on their own which is why collaboration is so important. Using only one, whichever it is, cannot answer questions fully. Patterns can be found with either approach of course and some of these are already insightful. However, combining both approaches provides better and more answers which leads in turn to greater understanding.

To finish, here is an example, albeit heavily simplified. I discovered from numeric data that FC Twente created a goal attempt from 40% of their corners last season in comparison to a league average of around 25%. Discussing this with a colleague, he suggested that this may have been so high because Twente often brought a man out of the penalty area as if to take a short corner. What generally happens if a team does this? The defending team brings two men out of the box leaving more space for the attacking team if the corner is then hit long rather than short. With quantitative data it was possible to identify this pattern in the first place but only communication with others leading to qualitative analysis using video produced a full picture. Using either approach separately from the other would probably not have led to seeing the whole picture.

It is important to work together and not fall into the trap presented by Hollywood in both Moneyball  or The Trouble with the Curve. Both of these films suggest that there is some sort of battle going on between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Buying into that will only hold football analytics back.

How can three of the world’s top five team be in the same RWC pool?

A few months ago, I wrote about the unfairness to some teams of the draw for World Cup qualification for football taking place more than a year before the European matches began. In rugby there is a similar situation, one that is arguably worse.

The 2015 Rugby World Cup was drawn on December 3 last year, nearly three years before the competition begins. Qualification wasn’t complete so eight of the teams who will take part aren’t even known. However, the problem lies more with the 12 participants that we do know, the teams ranked one to 12 in the world.

This is how those 12 teams ranked on December 3, 2012 and how they rank now, just over three months later after only 15 matches involving these 12 teams have been played since the draw:

This means that Pool A now contains the teams ranked third, fourth and fifth in the world. Pool D has no teams at all from the world’s current top five – sixth ranked France’s rivals are Ireland and Tonga. Of course, it might all change again by the time the competition starts in September 2015.

The same situation occurred at the last Rugby World Cup when Argentina were ranked amongst the top four teams in the world when the draw took place but had fallen to ninth by the time the competition began. Their group rivals England and Scotland had both moved ahead of them but Argentina still managed to finish just ahead of Scotland after a nail-biting final pool match.

The danger of holding World Cup draws so early is that the teams which contest the competition are very different to those that went into the draw. This could lead to lop sided draws in which one of the best teams in the world does not reach the knockout phase. It is feasible that pool A at the 2015 Rugby World Cup could contain the reigning Tri Nations and Six Nations champions along with the second best Northern Hemisphere team. One would not survive the pool stages. Surely no one wants that, do they?

Is 12 matches really enough to judge Mancini?

I have written about Manchester City’s Champions League campaign before here but twitter discussions today brought the subject back to me, not least this tweet:

So, to attempt to answer Douglas’s question, I would like to refer to Michael Mauboussin’s book The Success Equation and particularly his calculation of luck during a Premier League season which turns out to be 31%. So, according to Mauboussin, 69% of what happens over a Premier League season is due to talent and 31% luck. To minimise luck and thus be more certain that the Premier League teams are ranked in the correct order of talent, there would need to be a lot more than 38 matches but at least it isn’t a coin toss.

To look at Mancini in the Champions League, let’s begin with this season. As I explained here, the real problem for City was the strength of the group which was basically equivalent to playing six matches against Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. On the basis of relative team strength at the time, City were expected to finish second or third in the group but against that level of opposition, there was obviously a chance of finishing last. What is probably less obvious to people is that City were the underdogs in all three away matches which is what one would expect if their Champions League  opponents were replaced by their rough Premier League equivalents listed above.

OK, what about last season? That group contained Bayern Munich, Napoli and Villarreal. Again, not exactly a simple task. On the basis of relative team strength, City were expected to finish second but missed out on that by a point. The 10 points City managed from that group is almost always sufficient for progress but not on this occasion.

Not only did luck almost certainly outweigh talent over those 12 City matches, not least because the groups have been much more homogenous than the teams in the Premier League, but Manchester City have also had staggeringly bad luck with the draw.

English teams are almost always in pot one but City have entered the competition in pots three and two respectively. The two teams that Manchester City drew from the bottom pot of seedings were Napoli and Borussia Dortmund. The latter were ranked as the second best team in the weakest group of seeds this season, behind Celtic. So, City suffered the double whammy in both seasons of drawing a top seed who were of (much) better quality and a very strong team from pot four. Mauboussin also refers to the paradox of skill in his book which, if we refer to football, means that luck plays an even greater part when the differences in relative quality of teams competing against one another becomes smaller. That idea is clearly of relevance here.

So, hasn’t Mancini just been unlucky? Twelve Champions League matches are nowhere near enough to make a judgement on the Italian’s managerial quality, particularly given the overly high standard of their opposition. City lost half of their 12 matches and avoided defeat in the other half. After two seasons of bad luck, Mancini needs some good but will he still be there next season to get it?

Can we expect more big shocks in later FA Cup rounds?

Having looked at the last five years of FA Cup surprises in one of my previous post on this subject, I wanted to expand and examine the surprise results in all rounds of the last five seasons of the competition. Let’s first remind ourselves of the biggest third round shocks of recent years.

As the table above shows, there has been at least one third round match per season won by an outsider with odds of at least five (more than 4/1 in fractional odds). Cardiff City’s defeat in this year’s third round was interesting as the Welsh club currently lead the Championship. In the FA Cup third rounds of both 2011 and 2012, Championship clubs who were eventually promoted directly to the Premier League both lost at this stage of the FA Cup. Could this be evidence of promotion chasing teams suffering from resting their first team players? Cardiff’s team at Macclesfield Town in this year’s third round had 11 changes in comparison with the line-up from their last Championship match.

Looking at the complete FA Cup from the last five seasons, we would expect that the number of surprises would decline in later rounds as there are not only fewer matches but also that the rounds naturally whittle out the smaller teams leading to a smaller number of shock opportunities.

This is shown clearly in the table below with none of the top ten biggest shocks of the past five seasons coming in the final three rounds of the competition and only one in round five. There has though, been a fourth round shock in each of the last three seasons. Another interesting thing to note is that all 10 of the biggest surprises are away victories. This indicates how much more likely we are to see a giant-killing if the ‘David’ is at home to the ‘Goliath’.

Supporters of the two league clubs from Nottingham have seen their fair share of FA Cup surprises in recent times. This season’s third round defeat for Nottingham Forest at the hands of League One side Oldham Athletic was the first time in the last five seasons that one of the two clubs had been on the end of a big FA Cup shock. Previously, Notts County had won twice at Premier League clubs and Forest had won comfortably at Manchester City in Sheikh Mansour’s first season at the Etihad Stadium.

So, which of this weekend’s fourth round ties might join the above list?

QPR amongst biggest shock winners in FA Cup third round

In my last FA Cup piece on giantkilling, I discussed why Brighton & Hove Albion’s victory over Newcastle could not be described as a giantkilling despite Brighton playing in a lower division. After Tuesday evening’s first batch of replays, I would now like to investigate why one Premier League team beating another is classified as one of the bigger shocks to date.

QPR’s victory at West Bromwich Albion was the fourth most unlikely victory of this year’s FA Cup third round to date according to a set of averaged bookmakers’ odds. It was even more unlikely than non league Luton Town’s victory against Championship team Wolverhampton Wanderers 11 days ago. This was primarily due to the fact that QPR were away and Luton Town were at home in those respective matches. The role of home advantage is illustrated perfectly when we look back at the first match between QPR and West Brom as the London team were favourites that day.

QPR though are regarded as a much weaker team than West Bromwich Albion as shown by their respective rankings in the Euro Club Index. That objective ranking rates West Brom as the 96th best team amongst Europe’s top flight clubs with QPR 138 places behind them at number 234. Looking at their actual index scores, we discover that QPR are rated around 78% as good as West Bromwich Albion. That is quite a difference in quality which was then amplified by the home advantage which we would expect West Bromwich Albion to enjoy when playing at The Hawthorns. All of this combined to make an all-Premier League clash produce one of the surprises of this year’s FA Cup third round.

Ten of the 30 FA Cup third round matches played to completion to date have been won by the underdog on the day. This includes Fulham’s win at Blackpool in Tuesday’s replay as the Premier League club, like Newcastle United at Brighton, were the underdogs on the day. However, the biggest surprise of all in this year’s third round could also come in an all-Premier League tie. That is if West Ham United win at Old Trafford within 90 minutes.

The Premier League battles laid bare

As a companion piece to the “Race to 38/68/87” article which blogger James Grayson published on the Premier League yesterday, I have looked at the current Euro Club Index assessment of the competition.

The title race
As I touched on in the more extensive piece on the title race that I published yesterday, Manchester United have around a 93% chance of becoming this season’s champions, Manchester City have about a 6% chance and Chelsea a 0.6% chance. Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton all have a non-zero chance of ending the season as champions although the latter pair’s probability is so small that it has been rounded down to 0 in the table following later in this article. The remaining 14 Premier League clubs have no chance of becoming the 2012/2013 champions of England.

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