The Penalty Blog

Insights, research, and analysis on football analytics.

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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Applying the Pythagorean Expectation to Football: Part Two

Published on December 03, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

Part two of guide to applying the baseball pythagorean to football.

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Applying the Pythagorean Expectation to Football: Part One

Published on November 26, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

Introduction to applying the baseball pythagorean to football.

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Disparity in European Football Leagues

Published on November 20, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

Having mentioned the effect disparity plays on determining the league champions in previous posts I thought it would be interesting to look at the actual levels of disparity currently present in fo...

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Analysis of André Villas-Boas Vs Harry Redknapp

Published on November 18, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

Since taking over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur, André Villas-Boas has been trapped in former Spurs manager Harry Redknapp’s shadow. Every tactical decision or team selection Villas-Boas makes is...

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Effect of Season Length on Deciding the League Champion

Published on November 12, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

In my previous article I looked at the interplay between luck and skill in determining the league champions. There is another parameter though that also interacts with luck and that is the structur...

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How Often Does The Best Team Win The League?

Published on November 08, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

How often does the best team win the league? Probably not as often as you think as it is not just talent that is required for success; a decent amount of luck is needed too.

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The Poisson Model So Far

Published on November 02, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

In my last article I wrote about my experiences using the Poisson distribution to predict the outcome of football matches. The results so far have been rather disappointing so I thought I would hav...

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Using Poisson to Predict Football Matches

Published on October 29, 2012 by Martin Eastwood

The Power Of Goals recently blogged about using the Poisson distribution to predict the outcome of football matches. I have been evaluating the predictive ability of the Poisson for the English Pre...

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