Happy Face's Numbers

[Happy Face 29]

For anyone that likes these things, I've shared a spreadsheet with every result going back 25 years.

 

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByKcu35MQu-pUnQwSzN5Q1A1eWc/edit?pli=1

 

Download it and you can filter on managers, opposnents, home, away, goals scored, golas conceded, where we were in the league at the time, or date.

 

Perfect for quickly finding out things like how many games Souness lost by 3 or more at home in November while we were in the top half and that sort of thing.

 

There was one. a 4-1 defeat off Fulham.

[NJS 4386]

Fulham was the most mental game ever - should have been 17-4

[ewerk 30611]

Easier just to ask you tbf.

[The Fish 10857]

[Happy Face 29]

 

This should satisfy your addiction for a bit.

 

2,208 goals scored in an interactive graph.

 

http://www.economist.com/node/21603828??fsrc=scn/=tw/dc

 

(I look forward to your NUFC version)

 

 

 

The trendlines show the ten minute average.

 

We seem to concede pretty consistently at around 2 goals in each minute of the first half since Pardew arrived. that jumps to 4 per minute halfway through the second half, where overasll it's hovering more around the 3 goals per minute.

 

For goals scored we peak just before halfway into the first, then are frequently below 2 goals per minute until stoppage ime when we see another spurt.

[Happy Face 29]

[The Fish 10857]

Doesn't he tend to make substitutions around the 60-70 mark?

[Happy Face 29]

What Analytics Can Teach Us About the Beautiful Game

 

Sports analytics, no matter the field’s renegade posturing, has now been around long enough to have its own pieces of conventional wisdom. Baseball’s cognoscenti know all about the primacy of on-base percentage over batting average, and they’ve also come to realize once-treasured strategies like bunting and stealing bases are best used sparingly. In basketball, the mid-range jump shot is slowly being phased out as an inefficient relic of antiquity. Spreadsheets are shaming football coaches into rolling the dice more often on fourth downs.

 

But for many American fans tuning into the World Cup this month and next, soccer’s nuggets of analytic insight remain as foreign as the game itself. There are set pieces to orchestrate, attacking strategies to plan, areas of the defense to exploit — and it isn’t always apparent which tactics are best. But analytics has clear advice on how to do some things right.

 

Soccer analytics is very much viewed as a discipline in its infancy. And the sport itself is often described as especially resistant to the pull of number-crunching, whether due to its fluid nature, its sportocratic establishment culture, or a fear that the unsentimentality of data will rob the Beautiful Game of its celebrated elegance.

 

There’s not much truth to that. Off and on, people have been tracking relatively detailed soccer data in some form for more than six decades, up to and including the modern companies that exhaustively log every event on the pitch.

 

That said, WAR isn’t coming to soccer anytime soon. Most attempts to create an all-in-one statistical index for soccer players (like we have for basketball and baseball) have suffered from a distinct lack of transparency and a noticeable bias toward strikers and other scorers, whose output is most readily quantifiable. There are a number of interesting metrics at fans’ disposal, but no magic algorithm that accounts for a player’s role on his club, the system he plays in, the quality of his teammates and countless other factors. By necessity, even the individual plus/minus ratings ESPN uses for the talent portion of our Soccer Power Index fall prey to this phenomenon — we simply have to be more conservative when assessing the impact of a fullback than of a prolific goal-scorer. That makes it hard to distinguish between the value of, say, Manchester United teammates Wayne Rooney and Nemanja Vidić.

 

At the team level, though, the numbers offer more hope. They have the potential to provide soccer with broad strategic conventions comparable to the sabermetric-minded rules of thumb in other sports. None of these is a hard-and-fast decree, but they offer guidelines generated by actual data instead of blind hunches.

 

In “The Numbers Game” by Chris Anderson and David Sally — probably the definitive volume on statistical analysis in soccer — the authors tell the story of Charles Reep, a former Royal Air Force Wing Commander who was tracking play-by-play data for matches and serving as a quantitative consultant for Football League teams as early as the 1950s.

 

Reep’s research was quite groundbreaking for its time, even if it was fatally flawed. The Wing Commander gathered data on how often a given number of successful passes were strung together, and how frequently goals resulted from those sequences, broken down by length. Reep determined that a team’s probability of retaining possession dropped precipitously with each consecutive pass attempt, and that most goals were scored on possessions of fewer than three passes — often originating from quick counterattacks.

 

In Reep’s mind, this meant teams should abandon trying to control possession and maneuvering through the defense with endless passing. Instead, they should focus on getting the ball downfield in as few movements as possible on offense, and applying pressure on defense to generate opportunistic counter-rushes. The numbers seemed to suggest that the long game was the most efficient tactic for soccer success.

 

But subsequent analysis has discredited this way of thinking. Reep’s mistake was to fixate on the percentage of goals generated by passing sequences of various lengths. Instead, he should have flipped things around, focusing on the probability that a given sequence would produce a goal. Yes, a large proportion of goals are generated on short possessions, but soccer is also fundamentally a game of short possessions and frequent turnovers. If you account for how often each sequence-length occurs during the flow of play, of course more goals are going to come off of smaller sequences — after all, they’re easily the most common type of sequence. But that doesn’t mean a small sequence has a higher probability of leading to a goal.

 

To the contrary, a team’s probability of scoring goes up as it strings together more successful passes. The implication of this statistical about-face is that maintaining possession is important in soccer. There’s a good relationship between a team’s time spent in control of the ball and its ability to generate shots on target, which in turn is hugely predictive of a team’s scoring rate and, consequently, its placement in the league table. While there’s less rhyme or reason to the rate at which teams convert those scoring chances into goals, modern analysis has ascertained that possession plays a big role in creating offensive opportunities, and that effective short passing — fueled largely by having pass targets move to soft spots in the defense before ever receiving the ball — is strongly associated with building and maintaining possession.

 

As for the long ball, it’s proven futile in today’s game. During the 2013-14 English Premier League season, the percentage of a team’s passes classified as “long” by Whoscored.com’s data was very negatively correlated with how many goals it scored.

 

The same goes for trying to spearhead an offense from the wings instead of attacking up the middle. In their book, Anderson and Sally write about a seminal piece of quantitative analysis on the 1986 World Cup from researcher Mike Hughes: “Successful teams played a passing game through the middle in their own half and approached the other end of the pitch predominantly in the central areas of the field, while the unsuccessful teams played significantly more to the wings.” The numbers from the 2013-14 season in Europe’s “Big Four” leagues bear this out as well. The percentage of a team’s attacks made up the middle did have a moderately positive relationship to its scoring rate relative to the league average, while the relationship between wing attacks and scoring was of the same magnitude and in the negative direction.

 

This, coupled with the fact that corner kicks are surprisingly ineffective at generating goals, is probably related to the negative correlation between a team’s propensity for winning aerial duels and its overall goal-scoring rate. By the numbers, it’s a losing bet to count on goals in the air via set pieces — or even off crosses in open play — as a steady way to generate offense, just as it is to rely on the long ball to consistently produce chances. Instead, the statistics seem to support an approach more in line with the artful tiki-taka style exemplified most notably by FC Barcelona and the Spanish national team. In soccer, data and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive, just as they aren’t in any other sport.

 

That’s the one bit of analytics wisdom that could stand to become more conventional. For now, though, we have a reasonably good idea of which metrics correlate with a team’s success more than others. Keep those in mind as you gorge on soccer over the next month.

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-analytics-can-teach-us-about-the-beautiful-game/

[The Fish 10857]

That would be a lot easier to read if it weren't in Americanese, but still interesting none-the-less

[Meenzer 15526]

If you think that's American, try this, which a Yank friend tried to convince me was actually a valid and interesting read.

 

Had read the breakdown of Reep's technique somewhere else before (Jonathan Wilson probably, "Inverting The Pyramid"?) and the rest of it seems fairly common-sense, so there we go. Although I'm fairly sure that the argument about playing down the wings would be immediately dismantled if only Shane's KILLER CROSSES were being properly harnessed.

[Happy Face 29]

It was the discussion of wing play I thought was relevant on here given what @@Christmas Tree has been advocating.

 

[emoji4]

[Meenzer 15526]

As if he's going to read something that long.

 

(Those last two words may be superfluous.)

[Happy Face 29]

England’s World Cup hopes seemed to melt away Thursday with a heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Uruguay, which followed a loss to Italy by the same scoreline last week. Since the World Cup expanded to a 32-team format in 1998, no team has advanced to the knockout stage despite taking two losses in its group.

But the Three Lions are still mathematically alive: The FiveThirtyEight forecast gives England about a 4 percent chance of backing into the knockout stage.

Here’s what would need to happen; any deviation from this scenario, and England is out.

Italy beats Costa Rica on Friday. This seems like the easy part: Isn’t Italy way better than Costa Rica? Perhaps, but the Soccer Power Index (SPI) doesn’t see it as the overwhelming favorite; it gives Italy a 40 percent chance of a win, against 30 percent for Costa Rica. (All probabilities are listed as they were Thursday morning; they’ll change slightly when we rerun SPI overnight.) Italy and Costa Rica are also fairly conservative teams, so a draw is a decent possibility. SPI doesn’t have anything against Italy in particular, incidentally; instead, it takes a more pessimistic view of European teams than other ratings systems, particularly compared to teams from South America. That’s looked reasonably smart overall. SPI was also down, relatively speaking, on Spain, Portugal and England. SPI was comparatively high on teams such as Chile and Colombia, but there have been some potential exceptions, like Italy.

 

England beats Costa Rica next week. As of Thursday morning, SPI put the chances of this at 45 percent, against 26 percent for a Costa Rica win and 29 percent for a draw.

 

Italy beats Uruguay next week. These look like fairly evenly-matched teams, but SPI puts Uruguay slightly ahead. It gives Italy a 33 percent chance of beating the Uruguayans, against a 38 percent chance of a Uruguay win and a 29 percent chance of a draw.

 

England wins the tiebreaker. If the remaining matches in Group D go down as I’ve described, Italy would advance first with a 3-0 record, while England, Uruguay and Costa Rica would be tied for second, each with one win and two losses. England would need to have the best goal differential among the three teams to advance. If the goal differential is tied, England would need to have scored the most goals. I’m skipping some math here, but Costa Rica has a slight advantage in the tiebreaker so far because it beat Uruguay by two goals last week. So to win the tiebreaker, England would either have to defeat Costa Rica by two or more goals or see Costa Rica lose to Italy by two or more goals; a series of 1-0 results wouldn’t work.

As I’ve said, the chance of this sequence unfolding is about 4 percent. England fans might not take much solace in this — or they might think it’s too optimistic given how unlucky their team has been in the past.

But these odds are somewhere in the vicinity of those that an NBA, NHL or Major League Baseball team has of winning a seven-game playoff series after losing the first three games. The Boston Red Sox, who came back from 3-0 to beat the New York Yankees in 2004, demonstrate that sometimes the 4 percent chance proves a winner — and the Red Sox were once thought to have cursed luck, too.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/were-telling-england-theres-a-chance/

Apologies for the americanness

[ewerk 30611]

And yet that scenario would only get you 11/2 in the bookies.

[Happy Face 29]

 

The People Tracking Every Touch, Pass And Tackle in the World Cup

 

With each click and drag of a mouse, young soccer fanatics are creating the building blocks of the advanced stats that are changing how the sport is played, watched and analyzed.

 

Opta and Prozone are among the companies that have taken soccer stats far beyond goals and saves, into the realm of pass completion percentage, defensive touches, percentage of aerial balls won, tackle percentage and goals scored above expectation. Cameras alone can’t process all these stats. So companies employ people — mostly young, mostly male, most logging matches in their spare time as a second job — to watch matches and document every event.

 

Their work has helped develop stats that capture the value of players who don’t score many goals, but who set them up with pinpoint passing and hustle. Teams use advanced stats to decide which players to buy and put on the pitch. And fans, whether they like it or not, read and hear more numbers than ever before about this sport that for so long bucked the sports-analytics trend.

 

On a Sunday last month, Opta67 let me watch as the loggers at its South London headquarters tracked the last 10 matches of England’s Premier League season. I stood among rows of young men at computer monitors as they scrutinized games, sometimes rewinding on one monitor to check a tough call while keeping track of the live feed on another. I tried to stay out of the way while their supervisor leapt away from watching his favorite team’s match to confirm every goal was attributed correctly. And I watched as Opta’s media team processed the raw numbers — 1,600 to 2,000 events per game — into TV-ready factoids, which they heard commentators repeat to TV audiences moments later.

 

In soccer stats, as in so many other numbers-gathering endeavors, big data sets are built piece by piece by human collectors with human imperfections, moods and preferences. Throughout the year, 350 part-time analysts working in London and a half-dozen other Opta branches in Europe and North and South America record every pass, header and goal while watching live or recorded video of more than 14,000 matches around the world. The London operation I watched will be logging each of the World Cup’s 64 matches.

 

Opta says software, standards and oversight can help it harness the best of human judgment while curbing any potential downsides. It sees the people behind its stats as a selling point. I wasn’t the first to be invited to watch. Many prospective customers visit during matches, said Aidan Cooney, chief executive of Opta. “Frankly, that sells the business.”

 

The business is providing stats to professional clubs, to national teams, to leagues — as the official data provider for the top divisions in England, Spain and Germany — and to the media.

 

A Tebow jersey and a Yankees cap

 

My day at Opta was an unusually busy one: Every Premier League club was playing its last match of the season. The finale wasn’t as exciting as 2012′s: Manchester City was all but assured of edging Liverpool for the title, and most Champions League and Europa League slots had been sewn up. The biggest suspense was whether Tottenham would finish in sixth or seventh in the league.

 

That was the case, anyway, for Paul Pettitt, 31, who is the assistant manager of data collection and a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. He spent the two hours between kickoff and final whistle alternately tracking Tottenham’s match against Aston Villa — when Tottenham took an early lead, he said he wanted a 25-goal win to contend for fifth place on goal differential — and jumping out of his chair to check on calls in other games, such as whether an early Swansea goal was a deflection. All logged events scrolled down a screen at his station, and when an important one came up, he conferred with the analyst who entered it.

 

This is when soccer’s rare stoppages of play are so valuable for analysts. A lengthy goal celebration allows loggers to rewind and rewatch goals and other major events, often while Pettitt looks on.

 

But most of the work is logging routine passes. Opta’s analysts log each one by dragging and clicking a mouse at the spot where the pass was received, then keying in the player who received it. Their monitors have an image of a soccer pitch in the background with video of the live match superimposed on top.

 

Confusingly, to my eyes, the broadcast image hardly ever corresponded to the image on the field. So loggers had to drag the mouse to a spot that had nothing to do with the ball’s location in the video rectangle. None of the loggers I watched got stuck on this point: After all, this was the 38th and last match of the season.

 

Each of the 10 matches had a pair of analysts assigned to it, plus a checker. Each analyst had his own monitor and tracked only one team’s touches. Sometimes the analysts conferred over calls — “Is it a tackle?” was a question in the fourth minute of the Liverpool match. (It wasn’t.)

 

Until eight years ago, Opta didn’t even produce the live numbers that are now such a staple of TV broadcasts. Pettitt started at Opta in 2001, fortunately just as the company was phasing out pen-and-paper logging. He wasn’t lucky enough to miss the VCR era. “My elbow started aching after a while” from all the rewinding, he recalled.

 

The more unusual a team’s formation, the harder it is to log its matches. A well-organized side like Barcelona can be easy to log, Khalid Hussain, U.K. training manager for Opta, said. Today he particularly enjoys challenging matches.

 

At his peak, Hussain was logging 10 to 15 matches a week during each Premier League season. His primary assignment was Arsenal, and he also worked four nights a week covering matches around the world. He once logged six matches in a day. “Then I went home at the end, in a pretty bad state,” he said.

 

All this meticulous work changed how Hussain, now 33, watches soccer. He became “very passionate” about Arsenal, to the point where he’d enjoy watching a Gunners match against Stoke more than Real Madrid versus Barcelona, a minority opinion in global soccer. When he clicked a name at one end of the pitch and then entered the same name at the other end seconds later, he came to appreciate the players who covered a lot of territory more than the flashy dribblers.

 

And he learned that his previous pet stat of possession time doesn’t mean much. “Working here burst that bubble,” Hussain said. “It doesn’t matter how much ball you’ve got. You’ve still got to do something with it.”

 

Hussain is mainly a supervisor now, though he pitches in as an analyst when needed. On this day, he logged Cagliari for its 1-0 loss to Chievo.68 Like other pinch-hitters who aren’t familiar with their assigned clubs’ players and formations, Hussain watched DVDs of recent Cagliari matches to prepare.

 

The loggers Hussain supervises generally are between 18 and 24 years old and male. (“We’ve got two girls in Leeds, and one girl in Germany,” he said.) They love sports. They enter an office fantasy NFL league. They go home and play video games. They day I watched, none wore soccer apparel but I spotted a Tim Tebow jersey and a Yankees cap.

 

It helps to be nuts about soccer, to appreciate “a job where they get to come in and watch football,” as Pettitt put it.

 

There is occasionally cheering in the analysts’ box. “As much as you can try to control them, if Liverpool score a goal while Man City are down a goal, you might hear a yelp from our Liverpool fan, and probably some censored words as well,” Pettitt said.

 

Candidates are tested for their understanding of soccer and their hand-eye coordination when using the Opta logging software. They have to type quickly with their left hands, without looking at the keyboard. Certified soccer coaches sometimes don’t have the required hand-eye coordination; the avid PlayStation players often do. “We give them five-hour tests, and pick out the ones who are best,” Hussain said.

 

At that stage, successful applicants remain far from match-ready. It will be at least a month before they’ll produce usable data, even under the easiest conditions of logging a recorded match. “For training, they do the same game over and over for two or three days,” Hussain said.

 

Cooney, the Opta chief executive, has tried his hand at logging, “much to everyone’s amusement,” he said. “It’s impossible, absolutely impossible for someone of my motor skill set,” he added. “If you don’t play PlayStation, basically, you’re finished.”

 

Opta employs full-time analysts to review every event of the matches it logs, a process that can take three to five hours. Its live analysts get 99 percent of player identifications correct, Pettitt said.

 

The match-trackers are rated on their performance, and the best get spare games.69 It creates a competition, and “keeps them on their toes,” Hussain said. He’s confident that today he’s one of the best loggers in London. He also gets to travel to train loggers at offices around Europe.

 

The dubious goals panel

 

Among Opta’s competitors is Prozone Sports, which tracks players on the pitch using cameras and player-recognition systems. Stewart Mairs, the U.S. operations manager for Prozone, said the company’s optical tracking system — like SportsVU’s for the NBA — gives it a leg up over Opta. The system produces millions of data points per game.

 

Prozone, like Opta, needs human loggers, too. Prozone’s cameras sometimes can’t tell players apart when they cluster, and don’t distinguish crucial game events. So it employs coders, usually interns or students who are interested in soccer, Mairs said. Like at Opta, they are supervised and trained by more experienced managers, and, for big matches, supplemented by more experienced coders.

 

Cooney said Opta is offering something different from camera tracking. “People want analytics,” he said. “That requires holistic data sets, which only we can deliver.”

 

Keeping standards consistent across offices is vital for Opta. An assist needs to mean the same thing in London, New York and Montevideo. Soccer stats already have plenty of doubters, and it doesn’t help that different companies track different numbers. Also, individual companies sometimes change what they track, as Opta does nearly every year after an annual review. (Possibly coming soon: more detail on fouls.)

 

So it’s all the more important that a company’s data can be trusted across space and time. “What we’ve had as a clearance” — a defender clearing a ball out of the goal area — “has always been the same, and will not change,” Pettitt said.

 

In addition to post-match reviews, Opta monitors stats across leagues, to make sure they don’t vary too much — and if they do, that it’s because of style of play and not analyst inconsistency.

 

Opta also updates its stats according to decisions of a Premier League group called the dubious goals panel, which weighs whether a player should be awarded a goal when, say, the shot deflected off a defender.

 

Close calls mean the live data is provisional. It’s good enough for television broadcasters, who pepper Opta’s media team with questions via instant message during the matches. I wandered over to watch the media group in action during play. They sat next to a wall with six television screens, usually more than enough but four short of the required number on this day. So laptops filled the gap.

 

During play, the media team moved quickly. Liverpool’s Martin Skrtel scored an own goal in the 20th minute. Duncan Alexander, 36, head of U.K. content and customer services for Opta, told his colleague to “run it” — in other words, to check that Skrtel had just set the league record for most own goals in a season, with four. The stat was confirmed, sent to the broadcasting company Sky, and announced by studio host Jeff Stelling right after the commercial break.

 

Later, Stelling mentioned that Fulham had used 38 players this season, a new record. I asked if that was from Opta. Alexander nodded.

 

These sorts of stats are nice to have, but won’t change the way managers set their lineups or choose tactics. However, the work of Opta and its ilk have brought soccer, very slowly, into the wider statistical revolution in sports. Alexander and Pettitt pointed to the increasing prominence of assists. A decade ago, “some people would refuse to give assists credence,” Alexander said.

 

Opta’s soccer-stats professionals acknowledge their numbers aren’t for everyone. “There will always be fans who, to use a phrase we hear occasionally, say the only stat they care about is the one in the top left-hand corner” — the score, Alexander said. “We’re not zealots. We don’t bang the drum saying, you have to view football the way we do.”

 

 

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-people-tracking-every-touch-pass-and-tackle-in-the-world-cup/

[Gemmill 44880]

How do you get a download of Opta stats? Are they freely available or even available for a fee?

[Happy Face 29]

Think they're quite expensive. There's no publicly offered price packages on their site. Just have to contact them.

[ewerk 30611]

I'm guessing they're geared towards media outlets rather than your average statto and mega-expensive.

[aimaad22 4156]

Decent read that. A football based job would be bloody fantastic. At worst, you'd be complaining about having to watch 6 matches in a day

[Happy Face 29]

Was the U.S. Robbed Against Portugal? It Depends on What Time Means

After Portugal scored a goal to tie the U.S. in the 50th minute of the second half of their World Cup match on Sunday, some U.S. soccer fans and players wondered why the half hadn’t ended after 49 minutes. The question can only be answered alongside the equally valid, if seemingly nonsensical, question of why the half didn’t last 68 minutes.

 

Each half of a soccer match lasts 45 minutes, plus however many minutes the referee decides to add to make up for time lost to delays.1 The fourth official announces how much stoppage time to add, but that’s a minimum, not an exact number.

 

On Sunday, the U.S. entered minute 46 of the second half with a 2-1 lead. The fourth official signaled five minutes would be added. Four minutes and 33 seconds into that time, Silvestre Varela scored for Portugal, after a bad turnover by Michael Bradley and a great pass from Cristiano Ronaldo. Less than a minute later, the match ended in a draw — costing the U.S. a guaranteed spot in the next round. The Americans will have to earn that berth in Thursday’s match against Germany (or hope for help in the simultaneous Ghana-Portugal match).

 

Was the U.S. robbed? Well, maybe. But if it was, it might have been the kind of larceny nobody is ever going to investigate. FIFA, which organizes the World Cup, doesn’t disclose how its referees decide to add stoppage time for any given match, and FIFA’s website doesn’t list on its match-stats pages how much time was added.

 

So what is stoppage time?

 

Here’s one thing it definitely isn’t: the amount of time the ball was out of play during the half. Out-of-play time is five or 10 times as long as the time referees add back on. In the average 2014 World Cup match through Monday, the ball was out of play for 42 minutes and 11 seconds, according to data provided by Prozone, one of several companies that log every play in every match. Yet just six minutes of combined stoppage time were added to the average game. The second half of the U.S.-Portugal game included 22 minutes and 50 seconds in which the ball was out of play — yet no one was expecting the referee to add 23 minutes at the end.

 

“You are seeing a lot of nothing when you are watching football,” said Gabriella Lebrecht, a statistical analyst who analyzes soccer for the London-based Decision Technology. “The amount of time added on at the end of either half does not represent what you saw in the match. That’s where it gets really interesting, because that’s where you get the room for subjectivity.”

 

Referees have guidelines they are supposed to follow; the officials are equipped with stopwatches to track delays and with as much discretion as they’d like to exercise. Substitutions, goals and bookings typically count for 30 seconds. Injuries that cause delays also generally count. Other events that stop play, such as throw-ins, corners or free kicks, rarely are included in the stoppage-time tallies unless they take an unusually long time.

 

In European club football, Decision Technology has found – using data from Opta, a Prozone competitor – virtually no correlation between the amount of time the ball is out of play in each half and the time added on at the end.

 

At the World Cup, there is a relationship, according to the Prozone data, though not an entirely consistent one. There’s roughly the same correlation between time out of play and stoppage time for the first half and second half. However, in the first half, it takes 10 minutes and 23 seconds of delays to add up to one minute of stoppage time, whereas in the second half, five minutes and 28 seconds typically add up to one minute of stoppage time. The reluctance of officials to add much time at the end of the first half was apparent in the U.S. match, when Opta logged two delays that totaled over three minutes,6 and reporters noticed an epic water break, yet the referee added just two minutes of stoppage time. (All told, the ball was out of play for 18 minutes and 47 seconds in the first half.)

 

 

The discrepancy between stoppage time awarded in each half may be because substitutions are more common in the second half. It also could reflect the much greater importance of stoppage time in the second half, when it can make the difference between a win and a draw, as it did for the U.S.

 

Notwithstanding the higher number of second-half subs, in this World Cup there hasn’t been a big difference between time the ball is out of play in the first half and in the second half: 19 minutes and 43 seconds in the first, 22 minutes and 27 seconds in the second. Citing similar statistics, football writer Gabriele Marcotti has argued that officials should stop the clock when the ball is out of play and make each half 30 minutes long.

 

Delays are inherent to soccer, and persistent throughout any match. During the World Cup’s first 36 matches, the ball was out of play an average of 38 percent of the time during the first 15 minutes, and 47 percent of the time during the 15 minutes in the middle of the second half. Other 15-minute segments also featured more than 40 percent dead time.

 

Given this inconsistent state of affairs, the U.S. was unlucky, but not excessively so. Based on the usual relationship between time out of play and stoppage time, the U.S. could have expected to play an extra four minutes at the end of the match, rather than five. And several reports indicate that the referee originally signaled just that much time. Subtract a minute from the match and U.S. fans would have partied all night.

 

However, after the fourth official prepared to signal the amount, but before he did so, his electronic board was occupied with a U.S. substitution that went on and on. A full 82 seconds elapsed between the last soccer play logged before the substitution and the first one after it, according to Prozone. When the substitution was finally made, the official signaled five minutes. The U.S. might have gotten away with the lollygagging earlier in the half, but it was hard to ignore right at the moment when the fourth official was ready to signal the amount of stoppage time.

 

And even if the fourth official had signaled four minutes, the referee would have been free to let the clock run to make up for the substitution.

 

After Portugal tied the match, the referee was also free to add time to make up for the team’s celebration, but he didn’t let the clock run beyond five and a half minutes. U.S. coach Jurgen Klinsmann said the game could have been allowed to go on even longer than it did, which would have given the U.S. time to try to score a game-winner.

 

Other matches have had even more anomalous stoppage-time totals. Germany and Ghana got an extra six and a half minutes at the end of their tied match to try to get a winner, when the amount of second-half dead time suggests four minutes would have been more reasonable. Cameroon and Croatia, meanwhile, got about two fewer minutes than they could have expected, perhaps because the referee saw little reason to extend the 4-0 Croatia blowout.

 

The inconsistent relationship between dead time and stoppage time could incentivize time-wasting. If players know the referee won’t count a little extra time taken before a goal kick or free kick, they’d be hurting their teams if they didn’t take advantage when protecting a lead. Referees can punish such behavior by giving a yellow card to players who dawdle, though they rarely do so until late in the match, and almost never give two yellows — which would result in a red card and expulsion from the match — for the violation, Lebrecht said.

 

Inconsistency also leaves room for uneven application of the rules that benefits some teams more than others. In the English Premier League, this is known as Fergie Time, after the propensity of officials to give Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United teams more time at the end of home matches they were losing, and of United players’ propensity to score equalizers during that time. The Guardian and Decision Technology have analyzed the data and concluded the phenomenon is real. Researchers have found La Liga home teams enjoy the same sort of advantage in the awarding of injury time.

 

If you’re looking for conspiracies, consider that there was no home team in Sunday’s match. Alex Ferguson isn’t coaching in the World Cup — or anywhere else for that matter — and only Brazil is playing at home. Portugal has strong historical ties with Brazil, which could cut either way, and U.S. fans bought more tickets than those from any country other than Brazil. The referee was Argentinean. Without any clear standard for stoppage time, there’s no way to know what factors on and off the field motivated the decision to make it five minutes instead of four.

 

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/was-the-u-s-robbed-against-portugal-it-depends-on-what-time-means/

 

That last paragraph is bollocks considering they've already explained why it went from 4 minutes to 5, but still, interesting to note, even with substitutions, how little difference there is in the 1st and 2nd half in terms of stoppages. Always annoys me, the standard 1 minute added at the end of the first half.

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That wired article is a bloody good read.

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(Team has no significant strengths)