At some point late in the EPL season I could tell when Harry Kane scored more than one goal in a game without having to watch him play. That’s because a couplathree people would Tweet into my timeline a shot1 at me with a link to this. It’s the piece I did for FiveThirtyEight at […]

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 […]

This started a couple of weeks back when there was a single PL game where three goals were scored from an offside position. One was extraordinarily close, so much so that it’s barely conclusive with a frozen frame of the moment the ball was played. The other two were laughably bad. One was from a […]

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 […]

Of all the positions I may or may not have about expected goals, the one that’s truly indefensible is to say there’s not much value in ExpG, then sit on the results as if it’s a set of nuclear launch codes.So this is my model.I should clarify that there isn’t one model per se1. Almost […]

 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; […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’m an Arsenal fan. It’s often not fun. That’s not a complaint about results. Most teams in the English league pyramid would love to have success like 18-straight Champions Leagues appearances (or whatever the number is). It’s just that the actual games themselves often make for stressful viewing because the Gunners rarely put teams away, […]