Possession Analysis: A Closer Look

There is no shortage of analysis done recently on the fact that possession statistics tend to be misleading. A while ago, I looked at how teams with higher rates of possession in the MLS do not tend to win more games. Similarly, the Climbing the Ladder blog on the MLS website recently did analysis and found very similar results. Devin Pleuler (@devinpleuler) has done even more analysis on why possession stats are misleading for his Central Winger blog on the MLS website. On his personal blog, Devin has also looked at possession efficiency and how it relates to winning. Even more, the 11tegen11 blog (@11tegen11) has written about some interesting points on how to better analyze possession. I'm sure there are even more that I have forgotten to list here, but you get the point.

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Strength and Imbalance- A Comparison of European Leagues

How can we effectively compare the strength of different European Leagues? Which country has a stronger top flight, England or Spain? Which country has a more balanced top flight, Italy or Germany? How does the imbalance and strength of the EPL change across the different divisions? These questions are not easily answered, and do not even necessarily have definitive answers. With the help of data from Euro Club Index and Infostrada Live (powered by HyperCube) we can begin to make some analysis of Europe's top leagues.

The idea for this post originally came from another blog post written by Chris Anderson (@soccerquant), the writer of the Soccer By the Numbers blog. In this post, Chris compares both the strength and imbalance of 6 of the top European leagues. You can read the post here. My idea was to expand upon this analysis using the extensive and accurate Euro Club Index data, while also looking at more European leagues. This analysis looks at the top leagues of 10 different European countries. The analysis will be split in to two posts. The first looks at only the top division of 10 different countries. The second, which will be posted later, will compare strength and imbalance within each country's league structure.

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EPL Table Visualization: A Different Perspective

After the positive comments and interest in the scoreline visualization chart I posted last week, I decided it would be interesting to do another type of data visualization. Processing, the software I've been using for these visualizations, lets you do some cool stuff with making the visualization interactive. This week, I decided to make a more complete and informative visualization of the English Premier League table. 

I tried to make it as stand-alone as possible. In other words, I wanted people to understand it just by looking at it without other information. One point: its interactive in that you can scroll your mouse over a club's circle and it will give you information on them. If you are interested in more analysis and how I created it, read below.

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Scoreline Visualization

The idea for a scoreline visualization originally came from Devin Pleuler (@devinpleuler on Twitter). He had the idea to create a graph that represents how soccer scorelines tend to progress, representing both how often scorelines end a certain way, and how often games flow through a certain scoreline.

Using data from 1000 EPL games from the RSSSF, I've created this chart using Processing, which you can find below.

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New Site!

I've redesigned the Soccer Statistically site! Instead of using Blogger in the domain name, the site is now www.soccerstatistically.com, which is nice. I've also redesigned the entire website with a new banner design. Here are some of features on the site:

Blog: The blog is exactly the same, and is the also home page of the site. Nothing new here.

Statistical Applets: There is now a menu option called Statistical Applets. Under this are two options, Expected Points Added and Outcome Probability Calculator. The first is a table of the EPL leaders in Expected Points Added, a metric I created a while ago that takes in to account the true value of each goal when ranking goal scorers. For more information, you can read here. The Outcome Probability Calculator lets you enter information about a team in a game, and then gives you the probability of each type of outcome. For example, you could enter the 34th minute, at home, leading by 1, and see the probability of the team winning, drawing, and losing.

About Me: Just an about me page, with a contact us form link.

If you have any comments or suggestions on the design for the new site, I'd love to hear him. I'm working on adding some more statistical applets to that section for the future, which I'm excited about. Hope you like it!