2012/13 Soccer Thread

davet010 wrote:

In other amusing news, Newcastle MD Derek Lambias has resigned. So, no massive clusterf*** there then.

Only a matter of time before the transfer requests start coming in.

That said, Newcastle got killed in the percentages last year (PDO of 907 or so) so. If they manage to keep all the players you're going to see at least one analyst or journalist hail Joe Kinnear for Newcastle's "turnaround" when Ashley could have made a rock Director of Football and have similar results.

onewild wrote:

Great game between Italy and Japan, Japan were 2-0 up, then it was 3-2 Italy, now it is 3-3 with 5 mins to go and the Japanese are looking quite good. Although two very soft pens for each team.
Oh and just as I type, Italy make it 4-3

Keisuke Honda, who was great for Japan tonight, is currently available as a free transfer. Expect there will a number of teams making offers for him this summer.

Roke wrote:
davet010 wrote:

In other amusing news, Newcastle MD Derek Lambias has resigned. So, no massive clusterf*** there then.

Only a matter of time before the transfer requests start coming in.

That said, Newcastle got killed in the percentages last year (PDO of 907 or so) so. If they manage to keep all the players you're going to see at least one analyst or journalist hail Joe Kinnear for Newcastle's "turnaround" when Ashley could have made a rock Director of Football and have similar results.

PDO ? It's not baseball, mate.

If Arsenal sign Mr.Higuain I'm getting a G.GOLAZO jersey.

Which means he will be a total bust. Watching his 2012/13 goals/assists consisted of one nicely taken volley, 2 headers and a f*ckton of poaching tap ins. The assists were mostly pull backs to Ronaldo.

Theres obvious talent there but between the adjustment to England and the gulf between the players he will be playing with I'm not holding my breath.

I like Higuain - but it'd be interesting to see how he goes on as the focal point of an attack, as opposed to being an impact sub. It might well be that he's capable of more given a long run in a side.

davet010 wrote:

I like Higuain - but it'd be interesting to see how he goes on as the focal point of an attack, as opposed to being an impact sub. It might well be that he's capable of more given a long run in a side.

I'm not sure if he solves the problem of breaking down sides that are happy to sit 9 back vs Arsenal.

Its just such a hard quality to measure and rate when a guy is constantly finding open space and balls just seem to find him in the box. He seems efficient when he gets the ball in the box but at the same time his highlight video starting with a goal that he needed 3 shots to tap in was not exactly convincing.

The one thing it does clearly solve is only having 1 striker which was excruciating. Sure the false 9 is in vogue but Arsenal =! Spain or Barca. Especially when its February and the opposing side is happy to sit on their side of the cow field and kick lumps out of you and take their chances on corners and the break.

I guess the difference will be that at Real Madrid he was, by and large, facing worse teams and with better players providing him with chances. Arsenal don't have players of the calibre of Ronaldo, Ozil, Alonso or di Maria, so he'd better learn to be clinical. Still, much the same was said about Aguero when City signed him, so the proof will be on the pitch, assuming Arsenal sign him.

davet010 wrote:

I guess the difference will be that at Real Madrid he was, by and large, facing worse teams and with better players providing him with chances. Arsenal don't have players of the calibre of Ronaldo, Ozil, Alonso or di Maria, so he'd better learn to be clinical. Still, much the same was said about Aguero when City signed him, so the proof will be on the pitch, assuming Arsenal sign him.

I rate Aguero much higher especially considering he can turn nothing into something on his pure talent alone.

My fear for Higuain going anywhere in the Prem tbh is potential service.

Like you said thats allot of talent feeding him the ball and some questionable teams defending.

Right away IMO he will be facing tougher defenses and theres no team short of maybe Chelsea? who have the same midfield (potential) talent to provide that kind of service.

I don't think it would be uncommon for him to be in a game where he gets near 0 touches and looks awful at no real fault of his own.

A midfield of Yaya Toure, David Silva and Isco might do the trick

That said, he does always seem to me like a player who knows where the goal is, and doesn't necessarily need to be set up with elaborate midfield play, might just be the guy Arsenal need to tuck away that deflection, or a Walcott shot that turns out as a cross.

davet010 wrote:

A midfield of Yaya Toure, David Silva and Isco might do the trick ;)

What no mention of Nasri?

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BNO1s7OCAAESaHM.jpg)

Sure Chamakh will teach him something.

Spain v Tahiti, where the refs were booed for making the correct calls and Torres scores 4 goals but all people will talk about is his missed pen.

jowner wrote:
davet010 wrote:

A midfield of Yaya Toure, David Silva and Isco might do the trick ;)

What no mention of Nasri?

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BNO1s7OCAAESaHM.jpg)

Sure Chamakh will teach him something.

He's not really a fan favourite, if I'm honest. I did forget Jesus Navas though, so that's a black mark for me.

davet010 wrote:
Roke wrote:
davet010 wrote:

In other amusing news, Newcastle MD Derek Lambias has resigned. So, no massive clusterf*** there then.

Only a matter of time before the transfer requests start coming in.

That said, Newcastle got killed in the percentages last year (PDO of 907 or so) so. If they manage to keep all the players you're going to see at least one analyst or journalist hail Joe Kinnear for Newcastle's "turnaround" when Ashley could have made a rock Director of Football and have similar results.

PDO ? It's not baseball, mate.

I hadn't realised this wasn't the baseball thread:

http://jameswgrayson.wordpress.com/2...

http://jameswgrayson.wordpress.com/2...

What the f*** is that blog meant to be saying ?

"So to conclude, teams with an extreme PDO have been strongly affected by luck and will regress strongly towards the mean of 1000, even over the short term." Which means what ?

There's a word for that sort of 'analysis'. Starts with B and rhymes with 'rowlocks'. It might be 'maths a seven-year old is capable of', but the level of football understanding demonstrated is well below that. I've argued on this thread before that soccer doesn't lend itself to the sort of exhaustive statistical analysis that baseball has gotten itself into, and I will now produce this blog to back up my assertion. I could write more convincingly on sub-atomic particles than this guy can about football.

Why should Newcastle's save % get any better ? Why should their shot % get any better ? "Newcastle are almost guaranteed to get better results the moment Kinnear walks in the door" . Are they ? Why ? Have they signed Lionel Messi and Joe Hart ? Has their standing among PL clubs improved relatively ?

davet010 wrote:

What the f*** is that blog meant to be saying ?

"So to conclude, teams with an extreme PDO have been strongly affected by luck and will regress strongly towards the mean of 1000, even over the short term." Which means what ?

There's a word for that sort of 'analysis'. Starts with B and rhymes with 'rowlocks'. It might be 'maths a seven-year old is capable of', but the level of football understanding demonstrated is well below that. I've argued on this thread before that soccer doesn't lend itself to the sort of exhaustive statistical analysis that baseball has gotten itself into, and I will now produce this blog to back up my assertion. I could write more convincingly on sub-atomic particles than this guy can about football.

Why should Newcastle's save % get any better ? Why should their shot % get any better ? "Newcastle are almost guaranteed to get better results the moment Kinnear walks in the door" . Are they ? Why ? Have they signed Lionel Messi and Joe Hart ? Has their standing among PL clubs improved relatively ?

If Newcastle are abysmal in shooting% and save% as they were last year (and it was all-year, even before the Ba sale) why were they incredible in the percentages the year before (a PDO of 1030, I recall) with mostly the same players?

The only difference between soccer (or ice hockey, or basketball, or American football) and baseball analytics is people weren't able to throw around the "X sport is like baseball" line when baseball was in its infancy. It's more difficult to analyze than baseball and the data is also 2 decades behind but there's no reason a greater understanding of the game.

It's also interesting that soccer isn't fit for this kind of analysis yet Manchester City are heavily involved, including releasing their raw data to the public just under a year ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/b...

City release their data - so what ?

As I'm sure you're aware, there is a vast difference between 'data', which is the sort of tripe that poorly-constructed blog was peddling, and 'information'. The fact that Newcastle's PDO was different from one year to the next could be explained by any combination of a hundred factors, from pitch condition to sunspots. If Newcastle's shot % was 100 and City's was 20% in one game, that doesn't change the fact that City may have won 2-1...which is the only stat that matters.

The really noticeable thing, for me, is that neither the person who spat out that blog, nor yourself, provide any analysis of why the figures change - in the blogger's case, he all but admits that he has no idea why...which goes back to my original point. The compilation of overblown statistics for no purpose is no subsitutute for understanding the dynamics of the game or a particular team's place within it.

Thinking further on it over coffee, here's my take on it. Statistical analysis and data is built up over a huge amount of data points, and is more valuable at predicting trends as opposed to individual encounters. Now that's all well and good for American sports, where their ludicrously lengthy regular seasons are effectively only preludes (the NBA and NHL have 80-odd game seasons and yet at the end less than half the teams are eliminated from further contention), but less so for soccer, where the season is shorter and the existence of promotion and relegation means that individual contests at the end of the season gain a far more meaningful importance, which on a single game basis can have a team defy the statistical analysis and win out...and I suspect much the same is the case with the World Series etc, or else Bill James would be a bookies nightmare and the Oakland A's would have won 5 rings. It is perhaps instructive that the American sport which seems to go less for this sort of analysis, at least to me, is the NFL - where the regular season is only 16 games, and the stats which are most often quoted are of the 'Player X has 4.3 yards per carry' variety, as opposed to baseball's 'Pitcher C's stats playing at night under a full moon show that he has an ERA of 2.4'.

How did it take so long for this guy to get snapped up?

davet010 wrote:

City release their data - so what ?

As I'm sure you're aware, there is a vast difference between 'data', which is the sort of tripe that poorly-constructed blog was peddling, and 'information'. The fact that Newcastle's PDO was different from one year to the next could be explained by any combination of a hundred factors, from pitch condition to sunspots. If Newcastle's shot % was 100 and City's was 20% in one game, that doesn't change the fact that City may have won 2-1...which is the only stat that matters.

I would love to see you explain how sunspots would affect shot and save conversion of 38 matches over a period of 10 months.

The name of the game is out-scoring the opposition, and this sort of analysis is working backwards from that point to try and discover what causes out-scoring (i.e scoring more goals and conceding fewer goals than the opposition). The cause of goals can be broken into 2 parts, the attempts to score a goal and the conversion of the attempts. If you had bothered to poke around that website (rather than unilaterally declaring it useless after a short glance) you might have noticed that a team's ratio of attempts is actually fairly stable from season-to-season (score effects notwithstanding), while the percentages (Shooting% and save%) fluctuate comparatively wildly, even season-over-season.

The really noticeable thing, for me, is that neither the person who spat out that blog, nor yourself, provide any analysis of why the figures change - in the blogger's case, he all but admits that he has no idea why...which goes back to my original point. The compilation of overblown statistics for no purpose is no subsitutute for understanding the dynamics of the game or a particular team's place within it.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably wasn't sunspots...

The pundit or analyst who can explain anything likely knows nothing and is selling snake oil. Soccer is a complex game and to expect everything to have a neat and tidy explanation of causation for everything is unrealistic. Randomness plays a significant role in outcomes in soccer, as it does in basketball, baseball, and American football. If you flip a coin 6 times and it comes up heads 5 of those 6 times you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to come up for a causal explanation for why you got 5 heads instead of three.

The data available and the analytics invented aren't good enough to screen out all that noise (even in baseball, which has about a 25 year head start and the advantage of discrete events). You can't expect perfection and you certainly can't expect it from the outset.

The recognition of the role randomness plays in the percentages/PDO has its roots in baseball analytics - where stuff like Batting-Average-on-Balls in Play and Left-On-Base-Percentage which vary highly and the variations are outside of a pitcher's control. More directly in ice-hockey at the team value it was discovered that there's almost no difference in finishing ability and small differences in goaltending and that any variation regresses very strongly toward the mean (more strongly than the ~60% year-over-year regression in the Premier League).

There are going to be differences between the sports (I personally believe chance-conversion/shooting-percentage is more of a skill at team-level in soccer though it's clearly not all skill or we wouldn't see the random variation we do) but the fundamental principles at work here have been applied in part or in whole in baseball, basketball, and hockey (I'm not all that familiar with NFL analytics so I can't speak to them). I'm not convinced soccer is some unique snowflake that is completely different (especially since I've seen the same arguments against analytics in ice hockey that are increasingly obviously wrong), though each sport has its unique challenges.

[Double-post because the quote function was screwing up... which turned out to be me screwing up by not opening one of the quotes... sorry about that]

Thinking further on it over coffee, here's my take on it. Statistical analysis and data is built up over a huge amount of data points, and is more valuable at predicting trends as opposed to individual encounters. Now that's all well and good for American sports, where their ludicrously lengthy regular seasons are effectively only preludes (the NBA and NHL have 80-odd game seasons and yet at the end less than half the teams are eliminated from further contention), but less so for soccer, where the season is shorter and the existence of promotion and relegation means that individual contests at the end of the season gain a far more meaningful importance, which on a single game basis can have a team defy the statistical analysis and win out...and I suspect much the same is the case with the World Series etc,

We aren't talking about single-game, or short-series predictions here though. We're talking 38 games spread over 10 months, with about 500 events per team for the percentages/PDO and 1000 events for the Total Shots Ratio/Corsi. Nobody's presenting things as if they're clairvoyant (and again, if they are they're probably selling snakeoil).

or else Bill James would be a bookies nightmare and the Oakland A's would have won 5 rings. It is perhaps instructive that the American sport which seems to go less for this sort of analysis, at least to me, is the NFL - where the regular season is only 16 games, and the stats which are most often quoted are of the 'Player X has 4.3 yards per carry' variety, as opposed to baseball's 'Pitcher C's stats playing at night under a full moon show that he has an ERA of 2.4'.

The randomness in the sport and the lack of clairvoyance and bookies generally being pretty good at their jobs and genreally quick to adapt means getting rich through analytics betting is unlikely to happen. I don't bet and I'm not up with the betting scene but I imagine that betting faces similar issues as an active conventional investment strategy compared to a passive conventional one where you really only make big money if you have a transaction cost advantage or inside information.

As for the A's and the five rings, once again, we aren't talking about being able to predict things perfectly plus any expectation like that is inherently unrealistic if you have even a passing familiarity with baseball and the playoffs. Over the season the best team wins about 60% of the games and in the playoffs you're facing teams who at least 50% of their games over the season. If the spread's that big the superior team win a one-off game against the inferior team only 55% of the time, and we're talking first to 3 wins in the first round and first to 4 in the third. No model is ever going to be

It is perhaps instructive that the American sport which seems to go less for this sort of analysis, at least to me, is the NFL - where the regular season is only 16 games, and the stats which are most often quoted are of the 'Player X has 4.3 yards per carry' variety, as opposed to baseball's 'Pitcher C's stats playing at night under a full moon show that he has an ERA of 2.4'.

That small-sample strawman/parody of sabermetric thinking is amusing, especially since you're much, much more likely find that type of thinking among the old-school, non-saber types of analysts (specifically head-to-head pitcher/batter matchups which are entirely useless yet constantly trotted out by television and radio talking heads).

Interesting that you bring up the NFL though, in many ways they're ahead of the NHL in analytics and you're seeing teams increasing involved in developing analytics, despite there only being 16 games (less than half the number of games in the Premier League, my God what madness!)

You don't have to become interested in analytics to enjoy watching the game. I'm interested because it increases my understanding of what's going on and looking at the numbers is more accurate than watching the game in a non-systematic matter (this is even true of hockey for me which I am intimately familiar with). You don't have to engage me when I bring up them up, though I love that they're increasingly being talked about and mentioned in the NHL thread. If you are going to discuss and dismiss them I hope to see you do it in a systematic fashion, disproving the thinking I'm basing my discussion on rather than hand-waving them away because soccer's a unique snowflake and the analytics themselves aren't 100% perfect and can't predict the future with certainty.

Notice that when I originally referred to their PDO, I didn't say that Newcastle would definitely be back pushing for the Champions League again, merely they should be improved because they got killed in the percentages (and, as we've seen, the percentages tend to regress toward the mean ~60% year-over-year). With the same coach, similar players, and a similar levels of injury they should be safely mid-table because of that regression. Had their shot-ratio changed significantly from last season to this season (it improved but that's likely down to score-effects - teams that trail take more shots, teams that lead take fewer) I wouldn't be so optimistic.

The Brazilians appear to be playing American football today.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

The Brazilians appear to be playing American football today.

That freekick from Neymar was something. Also, was Buffon getting a cup of tea on the Fred goal (great determination there from Fred?).

Edit: The decision by the ref on second Italy goal would fit right in with the NHL playoffs. What the heck happened there?

Good game. Pretty impressive feat for the Brazilians considering all the players they were missing.

Roke wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

The Brazilians appear to be playing American football today.

That freekick from Neymar was something. Also, was Buffon getting a cup of tea on the Fred goal (great determination there from Fred?).

Edit: The decision by the ref on second Italy goal would fit right in with the NHL playoffs. What the heck happened there?

He was about to blow for a penalty as Balotelli was pulled down, but decided to play the advantage as Italy had scored.

Great goal by Spain to start this game off.

I never saw a replay with a good angle, but it looked to me like Alba was a mile offsides there.

Didn't even realize the u20 was also going on. Kinda strange as it somewhat overlaps the u21 euro. Will have to check out some games once its in the knock outs.

Lots of nonesnese in the transfer window. Hopefully the July 1st official open for the prem, real actually appointing a manager and the confederations cup wrapping up will get it going.

Papers must be in heaven. Can pretty much type any rumor knowing it won't be resolved for the time being. Rooney to Barca? Really?

Also Liverpool linked with some guy at 20m pounds plus I've never heard of and no one else seems in for makes me laugh. In comparison Fellaini is a steal at 23m plus 100k a week if those rumors are true. He's 25 originally cost 14m and proven in england already. I would be more excited if Arsenal grabbed him then a big name striker tbh.

I've watched a little of the U20s, since I've been in a soccer mood. Hilarious that they're being shown on ESPN stations but there are almost no fans there.

Higuain looks tasty, I prefer him to addition in midfield: Fellaini is a good player, but at the same time he would be perhaps be a replacement for Wilshere/Arteta in that midfield, wouldn't he, unless there's some serious reshuffling happens in terms of team shape.

Indeed he has. While he actually managed to put in a full shift last season, he appeared to have gone backwards slightly and never seemed fully committed to the club. It was also clear that he wasn't going to sign a new contract without a lot of tiresome grief, so better to move on now than have a player not fully aligned to the cause.

Still, as someone reminded me last night "it's not that long ago that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth because we failed to sign Mido.."