The Penalty Blog

Insights, research, and analysis on football analytics

Frequency of Draws in Football

Frequency of Draws in Football

There has been some discussion and misunderstanding around the low frequency of draws in football on my Twitter feed recently so I thought I'd just give a quick recap around why the probabilities of draws are so low...

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Updated Massey Ratings

Updated Massey Ratings

Updated Massey ratings for the English Premier League showing how well teams are really doing when you account for their strength of schedule...

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Expected Goals And Support Vector Machines

Expected Goals And Support Vector Machines

I've written about expected goals on this website before but I've changed approach recently so I thought I'd write up some of the different ideas I've been playing around with...

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PlayerRatings And False Negatives

PlayerRatings And False Negatives

My last article looked at how well my PlayerRatings model predicted which young players would go on to have successful careers. This time we explore false negatives - which top players may have wrongly had low PlayerRatings in their youth...

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Backtesting PlayerRatings

Backtesting PlayerRatings

Following my last article discussing my PlayerRating model for quantifying footballers, JackIO challenged me to test the model by looking at what young players it recommended...

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PlayerRatings And Team Quality

PlayerRatings And Team Quality

My previous article introduced PlayerRatings, a mathematical model I’ve been working on over the past few months to quantify the ability of individual footballers. One of the nice characteristics of this approach is that player ratings can be aggregated together to create team...

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