FAO Happy Face

[ChezGiven 0]

Got to give Shearer some time, he is the right choice for the club, you cant make this decision on the basis of some HR aptitude test, the role of football club manager has too many dimensions to find exactly the right fit. Shearer is close enough and that'll do for me.

 

Its funny people's attitude, on the way to the boro match with my dad in the car he turns and goes 'name me one striker that has been a top manager'. I just laughed and said 'Cloughie for one'.

[Fop 1]

Got to give Shearer some time, he is the right choice for the club, you cant make this decision on the basis of some HR aptitude test, the role of football club manager has too many dimensions to find exactly the right fit. Shearer is close enough and that'll do for me.

 

Its funny people's attitude, on the way to the boro match with my dad in the car he turns and goes 'name me one striker that has been a top manager'. I just laughed and said 'Cloughie for one'.

 

Strikers make the best managers.

[Guest Hova]

Got to give Shearer some time, he is the right choice for the club, you cant make this decision on the basis of some HR aptitude test, the role of football club manager has too many dimensions to find exactly the right fit. Shearer is close enough and that'll do for me.

 

Its funny people's attitude, on the way to the boro match with my dad in the car he turns and goes 'name me one striker that has been a top manager'. I just laughed and said 'Cloughie for one'.

 

Alex Ferguson?

[Gemmill 46093]

Was just about to post that.

[ChezGiven 0]

I wasnt going to make an exhaustive list, its just people you hear people often relating an ex-players position on the pitch to their aptitude to being a manager, when clearly the two are only at best, tenuously related, if at all.

[bjquick 0]

The table with games to point ratio is pointless. The circumstances shearer through himself into would be hard enough for the most experienced managers. Going off that table we should of got joe back for the last game against villa to secure that point to keep us up

[Happy Face 29]

You can't really damn a manager completeley based on less than a season. Was Brian Clough as bad as his 7 games at Leeds United suggest?

 

I heard a good stat today though. Everyone's asking if we deserved to go down, so More or Less on Radio 4 looked into it and found that if the season went on forever, we'd be 43% likely to go down. That stat's not in the write-up (it's in the podcast), but the other stuff is interesting too...

 

 

 

Why should anyone take any notice of what a Cambridge professor of statistics, who knows little about football and does not even support a team, says about this weekend's matches?

 

The answer lies in the increasingly sophisticated mathematical models that are being used by sports betting companies to set odds and identify potentially good bets.

 

Let us look at Arsenal playing Stoke City at home on Sunday, and ask - how many goals is Arsenal going to score?

 

The average number of goals scored by a Premier League team at home this season is 1.36.

 

But Arsenal is not average - in fact they have scored 39% above average at home, so we could add this "strong attack factor" of 39% to get 1.89 expected goals.

 

Now we need to take into account the defence strength of the opposition, and we find that this season Stoke City has conceded 11% more goals than average, so we add a further "weak defence factor" of 11% to get a final total of 2.1 expected goals from Arsenal.

 

Now no team is going to score 2.1 goals, but we can use some probability theory (rather bizarrely called a Poisson distribution after Monsieur Poisson) to estimate a 12% chance that Arsenal will score 0 goals, a 26% chance of getting 1 goal, a 27% chance of scoring 2, and so on.

 

Meanwhile, Stoke City is estimated to have a 51% chance of not scoring at all, a 34% chance of getting 1 goal, and only 15% chance of getting 2 or more goals.

 

We can then easily work out the chance of a particular score - it turns out that the most likely score is 2-0 but even this only has a 14% chance.

 

This is the simplest possible analysis and can be easily done on a spreadsheet.

 

With my student Yin-Lam Ng we have been looking at all the major league results in Europe for the past 20 years and found that better predictions can be made by including something called the pitch-factor.

 

This reflects the fact that there is a slight but measurable relationship between the conditions on the pitch and the number of goals scored by both teams.

 

This means that teams have some tendency to either both score high or low.

 

This needs special software and gives the predictions shown in the table.

 

One thing the model makes very clear is that although we can sometimes be reasonably confident who will win certain games, it is much harder to nail down the exact scores.

 

For example, although the model suggests a 72% chance that Arsenal will beat Stoke on Sunday, there is only a 14% chance that the final score will be exactly 2-0.

 

There is 13% chance it will be 1-0, and a 9% chance of 2-1.

 

So with even the best mathematical models, predicting the exact scores involves a lot of luck, which means Mark Lawrenson is still in with a good chance of beating the computer this weekend.

 

One final word of caution: These techniques are not as sophisticated as the models the bookies use, and they do not respond to public opinion as bookies' odds do.

 

So we only give Hull City a 9% chance of beating Manchester United on Sunday, which may be reasonable if we just look at past performance.

 

But judging from the betting, people clearly feel Hull has a better chance than this given their perilous circumstances and with Man U conserving their strength.

 

Maths can find it difficult to deal with these factors.

 

So I would not recommend anyone using these odds for betting.

 

You have been warned.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/more...professor%20did

 

He seems to do better using stats than Lawro does with footballing knowledge.

 

9 correct results out of 10. 2 with the exact score.