Ranking Soccer Players By Following the Bouncing Ball 142
sciencehabit excerpts from an interesting report on statistics for soccer, in the stats-obsessed world of sports: "Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match's difficulty and importance. ... So researchers turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, the team created software that can trace the ball's flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn't matter. Only the ball's flow toward the goal and each player's role in getting it there factors into the program's point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player."
Re:Um ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Flawed metric (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't measure defensive contributions and doesn't account for stronger defense against known good players. Someone remind these people that soccer is a team sport.
Re:incomplete metrics (Score:4, Interesting)
Defense seems like it'd be easy to solve, just add a metric that counts number of times a player gains possession of the ball from the other team or otherwise interferes with a pass or goal.
Re:incomplete metrics (Score:5, Interesting)
In other big soccer news: (Score:1, Interesting)
This is a must-watch for all soccer fans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xLn-X8YJRg [youtube.com]
Prozone (Score:5, Interesting)
The top UK teams (and others around the world I guess..) all use Prozone - http://www.prozonesports.com/ [prozonesports.com]
From what I have seen at the International Broadcasting Convention http://www.ibc.org/ [ibc.org] some TV production companies do a fair bit of of markup on their footage too
On the other hand... (Score:3, Interesting)
It might also be a completely useless study of a pointless topic.
Also, completely WRONG as the very first commenter to TFA puts it:
ponckk
a team... can play as never before, and still loose, if they don't score.
A team that plays very poorly, can score, and win.....
look at the world cup history, and the majority of soccer matches.
Look at the debut of spain in the world cup...
your software is really nice and the algorithm has to be great. but it doesn't apply in real life.
thats why there arn't many stats in soccer, that is why is simple...GET THE BALL IN, thats what counts.
And your algorithm is leaving that out immediatly
Today, 02:27:4
Re:Um ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Drug addicts? Racist much? I think the NFL does a good job at keeping illicit drugs AND performance enhancing drugs out of the league.
And not very many NFL athletes "fail out of high school". As a matter of fact, very few NFL players get into the NFL without going to college. Would you like to tell me about the 16-year old English phenoms, how they go right into EPL feeder leagues, and how THEIR education worked out for them after failing A-levels and finishing school at 16?
I play soccer and not football, but I'm not going to pretend that the reason more people in the world play soccer because it's hard. More people play soccer in the world because it's relatively easy and all you need is a flat space and a round object. Because it is easy (but hard to perfect) is what makes it the beautiful game. NFL football is not subtle but it is not easy. I played in a third-tier professional German soccer league (as an American), but regardless of my skill, I'd never be able to play professional American Football at ANY level.
Re:Um ... (Score:4, Interesting)
In American football, we inflate the scores. If you get it across the goal line, you get SIX points. If you can't run/catch it past that line, but decide to kick it in instead, you get THREE points.
If you break down an American football game typical score like 24-17 into 1 point for running/catching ball past the goal line and half a point for kicking it, that would be something like 3.5-2.5, which is roughly equivalent to a 1-nil victory in soccer.
I stand alone against my countrymen in this argument. Bigger is not better, my fellow Americans.
I have to take you on about the long game play though. The reason for the long games (three hours) is television and commercials. That's another reason soccer is not popular in the US, because it would require the TV channels to broadcast two uninterrupted 45 minute halves. Since TV here is dominated by advertisement money, soccer isn't financially viable for the networks because they can't sell commercials during the game.