The Penalty Blog

Insights, research, and analysis on football analytics.

Introducing the Eastwood Index

Published on February 21, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

On the whole, the Elo system works okay but it was not designed with football in mind and so there are some issues with it - for example it can only handle two distinct outcomes – winning and losin...

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Understanding Elo Ratings Part Two

Published on February 07, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

Now that we understand the theory behind Elo ratings, let’s take a look at how to calculate them and how to make them more relevant to football...

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Understanding Elo Ratings

Published on January 31, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

The Elo rating system was originally devised by its creator Arphad Elo as a way to calculate the average skill levels of two chess players. Although the system was created specifically for chess it...

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Predicting Football Matches Using Shot Data Part Two

Published on January 25, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

Having found that the correlation between goals scored and shots on target was the strongest of the various shooting variables I had available to me, I decided to see how well they could predict th...

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What Is The Chance of Bradford City reaching Wembley?

Published on January 22, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

With League Two’s Bradford City only one match away from playing at Wembley in the League Cup final I thought it would be interesting to see what the chances were of them getting this far...

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Predicting Football Matches Using Shot Data

Published on January 21, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

Previously on this blog I have discussed my attempts at using the Poisson distribution to predict the number of goals scored in football matches. So far, the results have been...

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Predicting The Premier League Using The Refined Pythagorean Equation

Published on January 18, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

New article for Betting Expert looking at the current Premier League standings compared with the predictions from my refined version of the Pythagorean Expectation.

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How Early In The Season Can Pythagorean Predictions Be Made?

Published on January 02, 2013 by Martin Eastwood

The next stage for developing my refined version of the Pythagorean equation is to characterise how many weeks of data it actually needs to make accurate football predictions...

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What Has Caused Dimitar Berbatov’s Recent Lack of Goals?

Published on December 15, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

Up until week 12 of the season, Dimitar Berbatov was one of the English Premier League’s top goal scorers and goal creators. However, since then he has gone 450 minutes without registering either a...

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Using the Pythagorean Expectation Across Leagues Wordwide

Published on December 10, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

The next stage for my Pythagorean's development is to testing whether it can be applied to leagues outside the EPL. Having one Pythagorean equation that could be used globally is preferable to havi...

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