Posts

"In Form Bristol City" (Nov 12 2017)

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When driving home last week, I was listening to 5 Live, and at a break between the Roma v Chelsea game the commentator said something along the lines of, “And there’s been another goal at Craven Cottage, which way has it gone?” It then cuts across to the reporter who then says, “it’s another goal for in form Bristol City, 2 nil!” After the celebratory tap of the steering wheel, I kept thinking, “In form? But in our last three league games, we’ve only won once and that was away at Sunderland; and we were awful against Leeds!” That has inspired this post. What do we mean by “in form Bristol City?” Is it how we perform over three games? Six games? Ten games? Or even twenty? To do this, I’ve taken a moving average of the points per game (PPG) of every result since Lee Johnson took charge of City, scaled to the number of points we would get at the end of the season. This is to see at when we have performed best and worst (10 points if you can tell me when that was!) over a give

The Comparison to Last Season (Sep 30 2017)

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Something I'm interested in is comparing how we did last season to this season, both in terms of the first 11 games we've played, but also against the equivalent teams from last season. The spreadsheet I've attached shows our results from last season put next to our results/fixtures from this season. The red box in the corner shows the points, goals scored, conceded and goal difference in the 11 games that we played this season and last season. It also shows how we performed against the same teams last season. I've put the relegated teams from the Premiership equal to the teams that went up last season, and the teams promoted from League One equal to those relegated to it. The key thing to take away from this is that w e're 7 points better off in the same fixtures as last season, scoring 7 more and conceding 5 less.

Relative Importance Value (RIV) (June 1 2017)

I’m a City fan and a maths analyst so as it's the off season and I was bored at the weekend (and inspired by the book Soccermatics by David Sumpter), I thought I'd take a quick look over our results in the hope of finding out something reasonably interesting. The result of this is what I've called a player's “Relative Importance Value” - (RIV) ie to see if we have performed better when starting with a player or when not playing him.  To do this I used the ratio between the points gained per start of a player and the points per missed game* . You could compare  two players by comparing their points per game values (PPG), but there is no way to understand how the team performed when those players weren't playing. If Player A achieved a PPG of 1.2, which seems better than Player B's 1.1 PPG, then we would say that the team did better when Player A played. Though, if the team achieved 1.4 PPG when Player A did not play and 0.8 PPG when Player B did not play,