Sublime
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What football had not witnessed, Anderson and Sally felt, was an analytics revolution. Plenty of people were reading the numbers and taking note of what they said: these are the players who have sprinted the most, these are the number of shots we have taken and the rest. But nobody – as far as they could tell, at least – was trying to find out what
... See moreRory Smith • Expected Goals
the first thing football scouts look for in youngsters is ‘intelligence’, the ability to see quickly what is going on around them and to plan for all eventualities – something we academics might call spatial reasoning. Nor are footballers lazy.
David Sumpter • Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury Sigma)
The England midfielder Paul Gascoigne once said ‘I never predict anything and I never will.’
David Sumpter • Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury Sigma)
“What I know for certain is that the conclusions I would draw from experience are different from the ones based only on figures. Because if Lionel Messi scores three times out of every ten attempts, he might be criticized by someone who sees only the statistics for being just 30 per cent effective. I’d say: just ... See more
Baseball people believed they knew the answers to those questions, and all the others. But those assumptions hadn’t been tested in decades, if ever, so it shouldn’t be surprising that many of them turned out to be wrong. From that gap between the assumed and the actual, Beane and his assistants were able to use their limited budget to construct div
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