21–30 of 39 posts
All sports are like this - they try and eliminate it with multi game playoffs, but you can't do that with intense games like this.
The NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball do exactly that. They eliminate with multi-game playoffs. Or do you mean soccer's intensity is like American Football, in that it is just too physically demanding to play that many games?
It's called football not soccer.
Somehow, they convinced us it's important. I really want to know how they did that.
A beat B, B beat C, A loses to C should tell you that there most be something sophisticated going that your model isn't capturing.
American Football fans will surely remember when Vince Young was starting his career with the Titans and all the commentators had this standard line "He just wins games!" because his team was winning despite his terrible numbers.
This analysis doesn't strike me as any more substantial than that ridiculous phrase.
Another problem is that soccer really has a level of randomness that is considered a feature of the sport. We don't really expect that the best team (in technical terms) always win. In Brazil, people commonly say that "soccer is a little box full of surprises".
It's called football not soccer.
One obvious problem with the approach taken is that soccer teams are not static. They change from game to game. They can start playing badly and improve during the competition, which could easily explain the observed behavior. Another problem is that soccer really has a level of randomness that is considered a feature of the sport. We don't really expect that the best team (in technical terms) always win. In Brazil,…
This means, more or less, that there are so many unknowns that trying to analyze the game is bullshit - just enjoy it. Even the quality of the grass can change the game, or the humidity. But of course, sport journalists make a living out of over-analyzing it.
Soccer is a low scoring game. It's not a "statistical problem", it's a feature. Treating it as "an experiment to determine which of the teams is the best" is not a good approach. There are a thousand contests in 90 minutes, but probably only two or three of them result in a goal, one of which may be from a penalty anyway. High scoring games are much better at determining the best team on the day. I believe that one o…
I think this is at the root of what really bugs (some) U.S. Americans about soccer, but they are unable to express it. Sports popular in the U.S. almost seem designed to allow for statistical analysis. Baseball is the ultimate game for a statistician, as you have data for every single pitch thrown and the outcome. American Football breaks the game down into series of discrete events (downs) each of which has a numeri…
I think this is at the root of what really bugs (some) U.S. Americans about soccer, but they are unable to express it. Sports popular in the U.S. almost seem designed to allow for statistical analysis. Baseball is the ultimate game for a statistician, as you have data for every single pitch thrown and the outcome. American Football breaks the game down into series of discrete events (downs) each of which has a numeri…
You can get a lot of statistics from a game of cricket, but it does not seem to have taken off in the U.S.
I used to play a lot of cards. Like, a whole lot. Every now and then a card-playing friend of mine would complain about their luck, and I always answered the same way: "People don't gamble on Chess." So very quickly: > Their approach is to think of a soccer game as an experiment to determine which of two teams is the best. The question then is this: what is the probability that the outcome of the experiment truly rep…