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PlayerRating: A Bayesian Method For Evaluating Football Players

Published on February 26, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

I originally submitted the idea behind this article to the recent Opta Pro Forum and although it was turned down I thought I’d write it up anyway incase anyone else was interested in the results......

Mathematically Optimising Your Fantasy Football Team: Update

Published on January 21, 2015 by Martin Eastwood

It's transfer window time so here's your mathematically optimised fantasy football team...

Massey Ratings For Football Part Two

Published on December 04, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

In part one I introduced Massey Ratings and how they can be used to rank football teams in a way that accounts for their strength of schedule. Next, we’ll take a look at how Massey Ratings can be e...

Massey Ratings For Football Part One

Published on November 27, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

We all know the league table can lie and one of the common causes of this is strength of schedule. Take Southampton, at the time of writing they are currently second in the Premier League twelve ma...

English Premier League Pythagorean

Published on November 04, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

I’ve not posted this for a while so here is the latest Pythagorean for the English Premier League.

Predicting Football Using R

Published on November 02, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

I recently gave a presentation to the Manchester R Users' Group discussing how to predict football results using R. My presentation gave a brief overview of how to create a Poisson model in R and a...

Expected Goals: Foot Shots Versus Headers

Published on August 28, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

My last article on expected goals introduced the concept of using exponential decay to estimate the probability of scoring based on the shooter’s distance from the goal. The article received lots o...

Mathematically Optimising Your Fantasy Football Team

Published on July 24, 2014 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.

Expected Goals And Exponential Decay

Published on April 22, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

In my last article on expected goals I showed how to incorporate the distance from goal along the Y axis into the expected goal model using Pythagoras’ Theorem. This all worked pretty well, giving ...

Expected Goals: The Y Axis

Published on April 16, 2014 by Martin Eastwood

Expected goals are one of the hot topics in the football analytics community at the moment and it’s a topic I’ve previously written a number of articles on discussing how to calculate them. If you ...

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