How do we gauge how influential a player is to his team’s performance? To most fans, it is safe to assume that goal scorers like Ighalo, Vardy, and Lukaku are crucial to their side’s attack, but how do we determine how important? How can we determine who has the most impact on a team’s passing […]
Some of the biggest story lines in the EPL this season have revolved around the styles of Mourinho’s Chelsea and Van Gaal’s Manchester United. Both managers have been under pressure for their team’s “boring” styles of play, albeit with entirely different results. There are a million different ways to win a soccer match. Sit back […]
I’ve been looking a lot at goal scorers lately, and it reminded me of a project I read in The Numbers Game on marginal points per goal. The gist of the study was that goals are a means to an end, namely points. If we look at goals in this way, then a goal is […]
Previously, I did an analysis of each EPL team’s performance based on their goal difference. However, as soccer fans all know, goals are often the result of luck (good or bad). Your team can create tons of great chances and fail to score, and can give up unexplainable wonder goals from 60 yards (I see […]
It has certainly been an incredible World Cup so far. Lots of goals, some great performances, and a few heartbreaks (I still haven’t gotten over last night…). I have been compiling statistics through the first two group games looking for signs of teams playing styles and performance levels. Obviously, one can get a very good […]
After working on my rankings for the 32 World Cup teams (which can be found in my previous post), I decided to get to work on a ranking system for the club teams in the top 5 leagues (England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France). The rankings are based on a teams stats from 3 categories (offense, […]
Based on recent friendlies, Jurgen seems dead set on the 4-4-2 Diamond formation going forward. It allows us to play with two strikers, gives us more options going forward, but seems to be leaving us vulnerable for counters out wide. From my observations, we can debate who should start up top or on the wings […]
I found some free time today to do a bit more analysis on some of the USMNT statistics. Thanks to work done by American Soccer Analysis and Squawka.com, I was able to do some work on shots inside and outside of the box, as well as a bit more with positional passing numbers. I wanted […]
Ran the same winger comparisons with Landon Dovovan included. I was surprised by the results to say the least. Landon ranks last out of the four in both total and adjusted scores. He leads in 5 of the 16 categories, but is last in 4 categories. Regardless, it’s not as clear cut a decision as […]
I decided to do some more comparisons for the different positional battles on the US squad. Below, I have my total scores for each players competing for the fullback, winger, centerback, and striker positions. I also included the scores for each player adjusted for the league ranking from IFFHS. Additionally, I added charts based on […]
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