Post by QPR Report on Apr 18, 2009 8:24:53 GMT
Interesting. Especially the way some freaked when we were on a 9 game winnless streak
The Times -
Fink Tank: Hull fighting the forces of gravityDaniel Finkelstein
Graphic: top of the drops
Hull City. I need you to think for a little bit about Hull City. I’ll come on to the rest of the relegation battle in a moment. But only if you stick with me while I ride my Hull hobby-horse.
When the season began, Hull had a 46 per cent chance of going down. In other words, they were — just — more likely to avoid the drop than to be relegated. Then they began the season in tremendous style.
Their performances seemed to defy the odds and in individual games they most certainly did. It was highly unlikely that Phil Brown’s team would defeat Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium. But although individually their results seemed extraordinary, they are a lesson that, despite the cliché, you really can’t take football one game at a time.
Football match results cluster. Let’s say that a team are capable of winning 50 per cent of their games. They will not win and lose alternately. They will achieve results in clumps. So when teams go on a run, you have to be very cautious about whether they have really improved or are simply having a cluster of good results that will later be cancelled out.
Computer modelling using goals and shots on goal allows you to make this judgment. And the Fink Tank has always believed that Hull’s early results flattered them and that they would come back down to earth. The only question now is whether the season is going to end before they make it all the way down to the drop zone. There is an 80 per cent chance that it will.
So Hull’s progress is eloquent about the importance of always, always, always judging teams on their class and not form.
Now, as promised, the rest of the race. Dr Ian Graham, Dr Mark Latham and Dr Henry Stott have been computer simulating the rest of the matches repeatedly. At the beginning of the campaign this yielded what, to me at least, was a startling discovery. It suggested that there was, as you would have read in these pages in August, “a strikingly high chance of Newcastle United being relegated, which we give as an eye-catching 20 per cent”. This has risen to a perilous 57 per cent. The chance of two teams from the North East going down is 66 per cent (Middlesbrough have a 70 per cent chance of being relegated).
Much more surprising to us than Newcastle’s difficulties have been those of West Bromwich Albion. They now have a 96 per cent chance of going down.
This is 90 per cent higher than we judged it was at the beginning of the season. On the whole, using Coca-Cola Championship data to estimate Barclays Premier League chances has worked well for us — it helped us to predict Wigan Athletic’s flying start and that of Reading — but not, it seems, on this occasion (although overall the model is outpacing the bookies).
We have never regarded Blackburn Rovers as likely to go down and we now regard them as relatively safe (relegation chance 5 per cent). Sam Allardyce was correct to gamble upon going there. And Portsmouth, who should not have been anywhere near the zone to start with, can feel reasonably pleased that there is a 93 per cent chance they will play in the Premier League again next season.
Manchester City still have a tiny chance of relegation — 0.17 per cent. And that is precisely why the Fink Tank does not start fiddling subjectively with the stats to adjust for something like Robinho’s arrival. It is far better to let the results speak for themselves.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article6115542.ece
And apast pieces
The Times - Fixture congestion another football myth
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article5904091.ece
Fink Tank: Fixture congestion another football mythDaniel Finkelstein
Graphic: proving a point - the myth of fixture pile-up
My favourite part of match-day programmes is the section where players talk about their lives, telling us what they do when they are not playing.
There is always a great deal of detail and I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you come across some archive copies. But a brutal summary is this: they seem to have a lot of time on their hands.
That is one reason why I haven’t come to grips with the idea of fixture congestion. You go to work on Saturday, say, and if you are asked to go to work again on Wednesday, that is supposed to be exhausting.
How Shankly helped rise of United
Would then Liverpool manager have welcomed SIr Alex Ferguson had he foreseen dynasty that was to be created at Old Trafford?
Anyway, you haven’t come here to find out what I think. In fact, the great thing about the Fink Tank — what makes it unique among columns — is that what the author thinks doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is the data.
Joel Minsky, Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been trying to work out what the truth is in one of the most potent football myths of all — that fixture congestion changes the outcome of games.
The Fink Tank team looked at 312 Barclays Premier League games that were played after a midweek European tie. Using our weighted computer model, we were able to establish what we expected the Premier League team to achieve in any given match, allowing us to compare our expectation with what actually happened.
On average, in games taking place after a midweek tie, sides did slightly underperform — they scored 0.13 points less than we expected. But this drop is not statistically significant — in other words, it is small enough to have happened by chance. As the graphic shows, Manchester United and Arsenal performed better after a midweek game.
You can split this number further and look at whether there was a difference if the midweek European game was played away from home. But you find no statistically significant difference — it does not matter where the game was played.
The usually acute Sir Alex Ferguson has added a novel twist to the fixture-congestion debate by suggesting that the dice were loaded against his team because they were asked to play away league games after their European ties. In other words, it is not the location of the midweek tie, but of the Premier League match that matters. An odd theory, but not hard to test. So we did. Surprise, surprise — when the results achieved in away Premier League games taking place after a midweek match were compared to those achieved at home, the difference was negligible. Ferguson’s complaint is baseless.
We went on drilling down into the figures, looking for evidence — any evidence — that fixture congestion had an impact on results. Did the number of rest days before a match make a difference, for instance? We compared the two teams in Premier League games and found that, for every day of rest you had more than your opponent, your team gained 0.01 more points than expected. This tiny number is not remotely statistically significant.
We tried a range of complicated equations combining the number of days of rest a team had with the distance that they had been travelling. But again, nothing. And one final try — perhaps the sheer number of games made a difference. But all we got was this: for every game fewer you played than your opposition, you were expected to pick up 0.0026 more points than expected, an utterly negligible amount and, again, nowhere close to being significant.
So fixture congestion changes the outcome? Another football myth.
Fink Tank: Super League is almost upon us
Fink Tank: League format evens things up
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/european_football/article5947189.ece
Do louder fans give their team a better shout?Fink Tank: Daniel Finkelstein
Graphic: come on ref! How officials' decisions are affected by crowd noise
Sir Bobby Charlton genuinely believes that the crowd helps the players to victory. In advance of tomorrow’s Carling Cup final, the Manchester United legend has called the crowd a twelfth man.
I have always secretly been embarrassed that I use the word “we” when Chelsea, my team, win. But now that Charlton is on the case, all my diffidence has gone. Well done for sticking that one away the other night, Didier, but I did the hard part.
Fans certainly buy into the idea that they are the twelfth man. So much of their identity is wrapped up in their team that a study shows that after a game the victorious fans have higher testosterone levels.
Manager sales - coming to a store near you
Which pitchside workstation would Jose Mourinho plump for from the Acme Dugouts catalogue, 2009
But Charlton and fan folklore aside, is it true? At the Carling Cup final contested by United and Tottenham Hotspur tomorrow, Carling and Sky Sports are going to be recording crowd noise and seeing which set of fans shouts the louder. I wish they were doing this at games every week. As I will show, it would be great to have a proper data series of crowd noise.
Let’s start with this. Crowd noise does make a difference. We know this because a fabulous academic paper recorded referees’ responses when watching a televised match with the sound off and contrasting that with the response of a group watching with the sound on.
The noise of the crowd led referees to give fewer free kicks against the home team and to penalise the away team more often than when the sound was off. Significantly fewer incidents were judged to be infractions without the crowd noise to prompt the officials.
The second indication that crowd noise works is given by home advantage. Fink Tank work — simulations by Drs Henry Stott, Ian Graham and Mark Latham — over the past few years indicates that home advantage does not lie in familiarity with a stadium (indeed, our latest work suggests that teams actually do better for a period when they move to a new stadium, although this is not statistically significant).
The impact lies somewhere in the balance of the crowd in the stadium. There is one additional factor. We found a strong and significant impact made by the distance a team have to travel to a game. The farther the away team have to travel, the greater the damage to their performance when they get there.
And then there is the third hint that the crowd is genuinely the twelfth man. Home advantage appears to belong to the team rather than the individual.
When a striker is in front of the net, they are no more likely to turn a shot on target into a goal when at home than they are away. But home teams still score more. Why? Because they shoot on the target more. So while individuals show the same finesse wherever they play, the team with the crowd behind them tend to pour forward.
Unfortunately, at that point the hints stop and the mystery begins. The size of the crowd and the capacity of the stadium are not significantly related to results. In an earlier study, the fullness of the stadium was (just) statistically significant and positively related to home advantage, but adding a bit more data in this latest work, we find that it (just) is not statistically significant.
So, Carling and Sky, we need your data on noise if we are going to know more. Very good that you are measuring tomorrow. But you can’t stop now.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article5817882.ece
The Times -
Fink Tank: Hull fighting the forces of gravityDaniel Finkelstein
Graphic: top of the drops
Hull City. I need you to think for a little bit about Hull City. I’ll come on to the rest of the relegation battle in a moment. But only if you stick with me while I ride my Hull hobby-horse.
When the season began, Hull had a 46 per cent chance of going down. In other words, they were — just — more likely to avoid the drop than to be relegated. Then they began the season in tremendous style.
Their performances seemed to defy the odds and in individual games they most certainly did. It was highly unlikely that Phil Brown’s team would defeat Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium. But although individually their results seemed extraordinary, they are a lesson that, despite the cliché, you really can’t take football one game at a time.
Football match results cluster. Let’s say that a team are capable of winning 50 per cent of their games. They will not win and lose alternately. They will achieve results in clumps. So when teams go on a run, you have to be very cautious about whether they have really improved or are simply having a cluster of good results that will later be cancelled out.
Computer modelling using goals and shots on goal allows you to make this judgment. And the Fink Tank has always believed that Hull’s early results flattered them and that they would come back down to earth. The only question now is whether the season is going to end before they make it all the way down to the drop zone. There is an 80 per cent chance that it will.
So Hull’s progress is eloquent about the importance of always, always, always judging teams on their class and not form.
Now, as promised, the rest of the race. Dr Ian Graham, Dr Mark Latham and Dr Henry Stott have been computer simulating the rest of the matches repeatedly. At the beginning of the campaign this yielded what, to me at least, was a startling discovery. It suggested that there was, as you would have read in these pages in August, “a strikingly high chance of Newcastle United being relegated, which we give as an eye-catching 20 per cent”. This has risen to a perilous 57 per cent. The chance of two teams from the North East going down is 66 per cent (Middlesbrough have a 70 per cent chance of being relegated).
Much more surprising to us than Newcastle’s difficulties have been those of West Bromwich Albion. They now have a 96 per cent chance of going down.
This is 90 per cent higher than we judged it was at the beginning of the season. On the whole, using Coca-Cola Championship data to estimate Barclays Premier League chances has worked well for us — it helped us to predict Wigan Athletic’s flying start and that of Reading — but not, it seems, on this occasion (although overall the model is outpacing the bookies).
We have never regarded Blackburn Rovers as likely to go down and we now regard them as relatively safe (relegation chance 5 per cent). Sam Allardyce was correct to gamble upon going there. And Portsmouth, who should not have been anywhere near the zone to start with, can feel reasonably pleased that there is a 93 per cent chance they will play in the Premier League again next season.
Manchester City still have a tiny chance of relegation — 0.17 per cent. And that is precisely why the Fink Tank does not start fiddling subjectively with the stats to adjust for something like Robinho’s arrival. It is far better to let the results speak for themselves.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article6115542.ece
And apast pieces
The Times - Fixture congestion another football myth
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article5904091.ece
Fink Tank: Fixture congestion another football mythDaniel Finkelstein
Graphic: proving a point - the myth of fixture pile-up
My favourite part of match-day programmes is the section where players talk about their lives, telling us what they do when they are not playing.
There is always a great deal of detail and I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you come across some archive copies. But a brutal summary is this: they seem to have a lot of time on their hands.
That is one reason why I haven’t come to grips with the idea of fixture congestion. You go to work on Saturday, say, and if you are asked to go to work again on Wednesday, that is supposed to be exhausting.
How Shankly helped rise of United
Would then Liverpool manager have welcomed SIr Alex Ferguson had he foreseen dynasty that was to be created at Old Trafford?
Anyway, you haven’t come here to find out what I think. In fact, the great thing about the Fink Tank — what makes it unique among columns — is that what the author thinks doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is the data.
Joel Minsky, Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been trying to work out what the truth is in one of the most potent football myths of all — that fixture congestion changes the outcome of games.
The Fink Tank team looked at 312 Barclays Premier League games that were played after a midweek European tie. Using our weighted computer model, we were able to establish what we expected the Premier League team to achieve in any given match, allowing us to compare our expectation with what actually happened.
On average, in games taking place after a midweek tie, sides did slightly underperform — they scored 0.13 points less than we expected. But this drop is not statistically significant — in other words, it is small enough to have happened by chance. As the graphic shows, Manchester United and Arsenal performed better after a midweek game.
You can split this number further and look at whether there was a difference if the midweek European game was played away from home. But you find no statistically significant difference — it does not matter where the game was played.
The usually acute Sir Alex Ferguson has added a novel twist to the fixture-congestion debate by suggesting that the dice were loaded against his team because they were asked to play away league games after their European ties. In other words, it is not the location of the midweek tie, but of the Premier League match that matters. An odd theory, but not hard to test. So we did. Surprise, surprise — when the results achieved in away Premier League games taking place after a midweek match were compared to those achieved at home, the difference was negligible. Ferguson’s complaint is baseless.
We went on drilling down into the figures, looking for evidence — any evidence — that fixture congestion had an impact on results. Did the number of rest days before a match make a difference, for instance? We compared the two teams in Premier League games and found that, for every day of rest you had more than your opponent, your team gained 0.01 more points than expected. This tiny number is not remotely statistically significant.
We tried a range of complicated equations combining the number of days of rest a team had with the distance that they had been travelling. But again, nothing. And one final try — perhaps the sheer number of games made a difference. But all we got was this: for every game fewer you played than your opposition, you were expected to pick up 0.0026 more points than expected, an utterly negligible amount and, again, nowhere close to being significant.
So fixture congestion changes the outcome? Another football myth.
Fink Tank: Super League is almost upon us
Fink Tank: League format evens things up
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/european_football/article5947189.ece
Do louder fans give their team a better shout?Fink Tank: Daniel Finkelstein
Graphic: come on ref! How officials' decisions are affected by crowd noise
Sir Bobby Charlton genuinely believes that the crowd helps the players to victory. In advance of tomorrow’s Carling Cup final, the Manchester United legend has called the crowd a twelfth man.
I have always secretly been embarrassed that I use the word “we” when Chelsea, my team, win. But now that Charlton is on the case, all my diffidence has gone. Well done for sticking that one away the other night, Didier, but I did the hard part.
Fans certainly buy into the idea that they are the twelfth man. So much of their identity is wrapped up in their team that a study shows that after a game the victorious fans have higher testosterone levels.
Manager sales - coming to a store near you
Which pitchside workstation would Jose Mourinho plump for from the Acme Dugouts catalogue, 2009
But Charlton and fan folklore aside, is it true? At the Carling Cup final contested by United and Tottenham Hotspur tomorrow, Carling and Sky Sports are going to be recording crowd noise and seeing which set of fans shouts the louder. I wish they were doing this at games every week. As I will show, it would be great to have a proper data series of crowd noise.
Let’s start with this. Crowd noise does make a difference. We know this because a fabulous academic paper recorded referees’ responses when watching a televised match with the sound off and contrasting that with the response of a group watching with the sound on.
The noise of the crowd led referees to give fewer free kicks against the home team and to penalise the away team more often than when the sound was off. Significantly fewer incidents were judged to be infractions without the crowd noise to prompt the officials.
The second indication that crowd noise works is given by home advantage. Fink Tank work — simulations by Drs Henry Stott, Ian Graham and Mark Latham — over the past few years indicates that home advantage does not lie in familiarity with a stadium (indeed, our latest work suggests that teams actually do better for a period when they move to a new stadium, although this is not statistically significant).
The impact lies somewhere in the balance of the crowd in the stadium. There is one additional factor. We found a strong and significant impact made by the distance a team have to travel to a game. The farther the away team have to travel, the greater the damage to their performance when they get there.
And then there is the third hint that the crowd is genuinely the twelfth man. Home advantage appears to belong to the team rather than the individual.
When a striker is in front of the net, they are no more likely to turn a shot on target into a goal when at home than they are away. But home teams still score more. Why? Because they shoot on the target more. So while individuals show the same finesse wherever they play, the team with the crowd behind them tend to pour forward.
Unfortunately, at that point the hints stop and the mystery begins. The size of the crowd and the capacity of the stadium are not significantly related to results. In an earlier study, the fullness of the stadium was (just) statistically significant and positively related to home advantage, but adding a bit more data in this latest work, we find that it (just) is not statistically significant.
So, Carling and Sky, we need your data on noise if we are going to know more. Very good that you are measuring tomorrow. But you can’t stop now.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article5817882.ece
