It’s Better To Be Lucky Than Good But It’s Even Better To Be Lucky And Good

Statsbomb’s James Yorke put out the following tidbit before this week’s Sunday games1. Leicester opposition all shot conversion rate from season midpoint onwards = 3.4%. Insanely low, can't last forever.— James Yorke (@jair1970) April 10, 2016 Of all the ridiculous stats about Leicester’s season I’ve seen so far this was maybe the ridiculousist. Made even […]

It’s German For ‘The Penalty The’

It’s time to kill the penalty kick.I’ve made the case elsewhere that Premier League officials (in particular) are terrible at their jobs1. Certainly there are multiple missed or incorrect calls all over the place during a match, which is understandable as A) many (most?) infractions are judgement calls to begin with and B) referees are […]

Shot Charts – Free and Fun

These are player shot charts for the Championship and Premier League last season. They should be (mostly) self-explanatory. Link here: https://mbertin.shinyapps.io/shotChartBlue crosshairs are goals; whites are misses. A player’s conversion rate is just his goals divided by the number of total shots. The last number, Naked Shot Probability (NSP), is a metric based on the […]

Spaghetti Plot

 This is a plot of all the variables in the model, as well as a plot of all the candidate models. You read it from right to left.Think of this a determining a signal-to-noise ratio. At the far right, we have pure signal. But we also have no variables in the model (nothing is just signal; […]

Why is Messi So Terrible?

For Argentina. Why is Messi so terrible for Argentina? Sorry, was that headline misleading? Lionel Messi has one goal through the group stages of this year’s Copa America in Chile, a 35th minute penalty against Paraguay. That’s only three games, so small sample size and all, but Messi’s lack of fecundity for the Albiceleste is […]

ExpG Comment Reply

Note: this is a detailed response to a comment left on another post (found here) about Expected Goals (ExpG).The claim was that I “don’t have any idea what [I’m] doing.” That’s the general from the specific that I had trashed someone else’s work, even though that work was apparently superior.As was pointed out, having an […]

You Won’t Believe What Wilfred Bony Contributed to Swansea’s Expected Goals

Nothing. He contributed nothing. Maybe you totally believe that.Anyway, inspired by this piece at Statsbomb (it’s about whether Swansea can replicate the relative success of their 2014-25 campaign), I started trying to think of some obvious things that might explain what Swansea were doing this past season that had them outperform their expected goals by […]