Statistics are starting to be integrated into more and more sports and we have discussed its increasing use in football in many previous blogs. Perhaps the hardest sport to try and integate statistics into is Formula 1 as assessing driver competency is extremely dificult due to the vastly varying levels of the car. To understand why the different cars vary so much, we need to delve deep within how funding works in F1. In 2017, the top earning team made almost 10 times the amount of the lowest earner. It simply does not boil down to the constructors championship as many people believe as the ..read more

Luck seemingly repesents the antithesis of what statistics try to achieve. A concept with connotations of random chance and a quantity which most people would assume is an external factor that prohibits the sense of regularity that make statistics so powerful. Luck seemes like the tool which would always play on the mind of someone when predicting the outcome of a football match. But can it be accounted for? If so, how? Skill is something that defintively exists in football. The void in skill can clearly be seen when comparing your average Sunday league player to the elite regularly featuri ..read more

Aaron Wan-Bissaka has had a simply monstrous start to the season. Putting up a mamouth 5.6 tacles a game, Wan-Bissaka has silenced his critics which prviously mocked United for what was suggsted to be a vast overpayment for a young English talent showing glimmers of promise. His 5.6 tackles per 90 puts him top in the EPL this season with even the most labouring defensive midfielders such as the likes of Wilfred Ndidi, unable to match his remarkable output. Whilst ability to pull off those perfectly timed “spiderman” challenges is now well known by the average football fan, many aspects of h ..read more

Below is statistically the best team of the 2019 Cricket World Cup. Opening Batsmen Jason Roy Although he is only 9th on the top run scorers list in the tournament and 4 other opening batsmen have scored more runs than him, Jason Roy has been such an incredibly important part of England’s world cup campaign. Amassing a considerable 443 runs in 8 matches , Roy has been crucial in getting England’s innings of to a flyer many times. The naturally aggressive batsmen has a strike rate of 115.36, putting him in the top 10 for the tournament. Despite this, however, Roy plays proper crick ..read more

What are Expected Assists Another football metric which is becoming increasingly more used is expected assists or xA. An assist, for those who may not know, is the final pass that directly leads to a goal. Every goal has a pass come before it, except for those which come from direct set pieces, so almost every goal will have another player accredited with an assist. The xA metric works in a similar way to xG, if you are unsure what expected goals are then read the previous article in the blog where we cover it in depth. The best definition of xA comes from Opta, who themselves produce the ..read more

(By football I don’t mean the American kind but the one that is also known as soccer) Statistics are becoming increasingly more useful to help analyse the intricacies that are intertwined within the beautiful game. In recent years new measures have been developed to revert away from the often misleading simple statistics such as goals, assists and clean sheets. These never have and never will be able to truly indicate how talented a player is and cannot assess the full package that a player offers. With revolutionary new breakthroughs such as the introduction of possession adjusted statisti ..read more

What are Expected Goals Expected goals or xG (which I will refer to it as for the rest of the break down) have gained a lot of negative and positive press recently from its appearance on Match of the Day, a leading British TV programme which shows the highlights of all of the Premier League games. Comments from pundits and former players have been very mixed with some arguing that the use of these statistics have ruined the essence of the game whereas others argue that it is another significant step towards quantifying the intricacies of football. So, what does the term expected goals ..read more