The Penalty Blog

Insights, research, and analysis on football analytics

Massey Ratings For Football Part Two
December 04, 2014

Massey Ratings For Football Part Two

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 extended further to look at team’s attack and defence strength separately.

Martin Eastwood Ratings EPL, Massey Ratings, Ranking
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Massey Ratings For Football Part One
November 27, 2014

Massey Ratings For Football Part One

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 matches in yet still haven’t played...

Martin Eastwood Ratings EPL, Massey Ratings, Ranking
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Predicting Football Using R
November 02, 2014

Predicting Football Using R

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 apply the Dixon and Coles adjustment to it to account for dependance in the scores.

Martin Eastwood Poisson Poisson, Prediction, R
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Expected Goals: Foot Shots Versus Headers
August 28, 2014

Expected Goals: Foot Shots Versus Headers

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 of feedback (thanks everyone!!), with a couple of common comments standing out th...

Martin Eastwood Expected Goals Expected Goals
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Expected Goals And Exponential Decay
April 22, 2014

Expected Goals And Exponential Decay

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 us an r squared value of 0.95. However, while the r squared value was good there...

Martin Eastwood Expected Goals Expected Goals
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Expected Goals: The Y Axis
April 16, 2014

Expected Goals: The Y Axis

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 haven’t read those pieces yet it’s probably worth taking a quick look to set the...

Martin Eastwood Expected Goals Expected Goals
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