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#FreeKickEVERYONE: A Study of the Free Kick Count as the Football Fan’s Favourite Scapegoat
There's nothing worse than seeing your team on the wrong end of a lopsided free kick count. At times it can feel like the opposition is getting an armchair ride from the umpires, but does this mean there's something fishy going on with the men in yellow? After seeing one too many angry Twitter posts blaming the umpires for the outcome of a match, I decided to dig into why it is that we see imbalanced free kick counts.
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Expectation vs Reality: Exploring the Output of the #1 Draft Pick
The #1 Pick in the AFL Draft is the football off-season’s most treasured commodity, but by how much should we really value it over the picks that follow? As a near-religious spectator of the AFL as well as it’s accompanying digital landscape, it feels to me as though every football off-season is marked with a sensational shift in the tone of the broader AFL media. Throughout the season the headline writers tend to routinely dish up a main course consisting of endless chastising of underperforming sides, while only leaving enough room for an easily forgotten side salad of praise for those at the top of their game. From what I’ve…
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THE POST-BYE EFFECT: Fact or Fallacy?
Picture this: It's been a gruelling front half of the the AFL season. Three months of high-intensity football week-in week-out has taken it's toll and you're feeling a bit banged up and a touch worse for wear. But the light at the end of the tunnel is right in front of you - a weekend off! A chance for some well-deserved R & R and the perfect chance to get your mind and body right to hit the second half at full tilt. You'll come out of this bye week with a head full of steam and the team will be playing its best football......right?
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Sports Data Modelling for Beginners: A Simple Elo for the 2021 Euro & Copa América
Building your first predictive sports model is a daunting task. Where do you start? How do you turn raw data into a prediction? This article provides a framework for building a simple Elo model which focuses on the upcoming 2021 Euro & Copa America soccer tournaments.
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Monte ChaRlo: Using data to predict the Brownlow Medal
Building a predictive Brownlow model is a lot like signing up for a gym membership. It takes a lot of time and effort to see the results, and if it isn’t working after three weeks you'll probably forget you have it. Nonetheless, over the football off-season I’ve been working on my own predictive model for the Brownlow Medal which I'm glad to now be able to share with the masses! Here's hoping that it fares better than my gym membership did. Follow @ChewTheStat on Twitter for Monte ChaRlo's weekly Brownlow vote predictions and running leaderboard throughout the 2021 season.
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CORRELATION v CAUSATION: The Football Analyst’s Trap
Correlation does not imply causality. It's among the most fundamental lessons in statistics and is one that can catch out even the most experienced data analyst. In this post I look at the process of choosing metrics to assess a football team's performance (KPIs) and the traps that need to be avoided in doing so - namely around the correlation versus causation dilemma. There are also some pretty visuals thrown in there too for good measure.
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MATHS POINT: Finding Tennis’ Winning Formula
Tennis is an incredibly complex, tactical and meticulous game with perhaps the most unique scoring system of any mainstream sport, but is there a way to simplify it by finding a mathematical formula which expresses a player's chance of winning a match based only on his/her chance of winning a point? In this article I look at how to build an expression which takes two inputs (probability of winning a point on-serve and on return) and is able to output an accurate estimate of that player's chance of winning a full match.
