The Penalty Blog

Insights, research, and analysis on football analytics.

Expected Goals and Uncertainty

Published on April 29, 2016 by Martin Eastwood

My Twitter feed seems to be increasingly taken up with discussions of Expected Goals in football yet there always seems to be something important missing from the discussion, and that's uncertainty...

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Ranking Football Teams Using Google's Page Rank Algorithm

Published on March 21, 2016 by Martin Eastwood

I've discussed various techniques for ranking football teams on my blog before, such as using Massey Ratings to account for strengt...

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It’s Not Just The Money: Quality of Signings Suggest China Could Become a Major Power in Club Football

Published on February 29, 2016 by Martin Eastwood

John Burn-Murdoch and the Financial Times have used my PlayerRatings model to analyse the recent flux of players moving to teams in the Chinese Super League - you can read the full article Read More

Frequency of Draws in Football

Published on December 12, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

There has been some discussion and misunderstanding around the low frequency of draws in football on my Twitter feed recently so I thought I'd just give a quick recap around why the probabilities o...

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Updated Massey Ratings

Published on November 24, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

Updated Massey ratings for the English Premier League showing how well teams are really doing when you account for their strength of schedule...

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Mathematically Optimising Your Fantasy Football Team: Redux

Published on August 07, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

The Premier League’s fantasy football is back ready for the new season so I thought I’d run through an example of how linear programming can help you mathematically select your team.

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Expected Goals And Support Vector Machines

Published on July 13, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

I've written about expected goals on this website before but I've changed approach recently so I thought I'd write up some of the different ideas I've been playing around with...

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PlayerRatings And False Negatives

Published on April 23, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

My last article looked at how well my PlayerRatings model predict...

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Backtesting PlayerRatings

Published on April 09, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

Following my last article discussing my Read More

PlayerRatings And Team Quality

Published on March 09, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

My previous article introduced PlayerRatings, a mathematical model I’ve been working on over the past few months to quantify the ability of individual footballers. One of the nice characteristics o...

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