hes going to be the ten hag loyalist. delightful scenes for an arsenal fan such as myself.
Roiling football blather
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hes going to be the ten hag loyalist. delightful scenes for an arsenal fan such as myself.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Tuchel out, complete Shedocalypse
Leo
Well-known member
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Brazilian soccer star Neymar backs Bolsonaro ahead of Sunday vote
Brazilian soccer star Neymar Junior endorsed President Jair Bolsonaro's uphill re-election bid on Thursday, showing his support in a TikTok video as he smiled and danced to a campaign jingle ahead of the weekend's pivotal election.
entertainment
Well-known member
barca robbed tonight
entertainment
Well-known member
the ref and the var ref completely bottled it. clear red card foul ignored. clear handball pen ignored. and apparently according to current rules, fati's goal was wrongly disallowed as well.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Noone has ever scored at the rate Haaland is scoring now have they?
I always find stats quite hard to select for importance and so on in football (having read a bit about basketball lately the way fans believe the stats describe players is totally different to in football, I guess cos it's a much freeer game with more players, bigger pitch and... well it's a debate in itself but I don't think football can be pinned down by stats in the way that basketball fans appear to believe about their sport).. but, that said, in terms of the simple raw data brute fact of goals per game I believe that his scoring rate is totally phenomenal. How long will he keep this up?
IdleRich
IdleRich
So Ronaldo scored today in Utd's win at Everton, and that took his club goals to 700.... but I thought that one of his goals recently took his career total to 1000; now I know he's the top international goal scorer but he obviously hasn't scored 300 for Portugal so where did 1000 come from? Or did I misremember that number or something?
OK, I checked, the celebration before was not for reaching 1000 but for scoring the most (official) total goals, beating Bican's total of 805. The official top scorer one is a funny statistic though cos it's not always been kept officially. Apparently Romario claims to have scored 1000 goals and I thought Pele did too - but I know some of his were for the Brazilian army team so there is some debate as to whether they count as top class.
This is what wikipedia says
Seems kinda strange that Romario is officially credited with 929 while the official top goalscorer is Ronaldo with whatever he has now - eight hundred and something I suppose. Maybe Ronaldo is the top scorer in top flight football as, I believe, he started playing professional football at Sporting at the top level in Portugal and has never played at a lower level.
Looking at his record he has 5 for Sporting, 101 for Juventus, 144 for Manchester United (playing for them twice) and 450 for Real Madrid which does indeed make 700 in the top flight.
OK, I checked, the celebration before was not for reaching 1000 but for scoring the most (official) total goals, beating Bican's total of 805. The official top scorer one is a funny statistic though cos it's not always been kept officially. Apparently Romario claims to have scored 1000 goals and I thought Pele did too - but I know some of his were for the Brazilian army team so there is some debate as to whether they count as top class.
This is what wikipedia says
Seems kinda strange that Romario is officially credited with 929 while the official top goalscorer is Ronaldo with whatever he has now - eight hundred and something I suppose. Maybe Ronaldo is the top scorer in top flight football as, I believe, he started playing professional football at Sporting at the top level in Portugal and has never played at a lower level.
Looking at his record he has 5 for Sporting, 101 for Juventus, 144 for Manchester United (playing for them twice) and 450 for Real Madrid which does indeed make 700 in the top flight.
IdleRich
IdleRich
But there is a twist
Which means that he is still just ahead of Ronaldo I suppose with 700 club goals and 117 international (unless he has scored more international goals since then). You wouldn't bet against him getting the 5 more he needs before he retires though would you?
Probably it won't matter for long anyway cos at the rate he's going Haaland will beat it by the time he's 25....
Which means that he is still just ahead of Ronaldo I suppose with 700 club goals and 117 international (unless he has scored more international goals since then). You wouldn't bet against him getting the 5 more he needs before he retires though would you?
Probably it won't matter for long anyway cos at the rate he's going Haaland will beat it by the time he's 25....
IdleRich
IdleRich
The above to me illustrates the relatively cavalier approach of football to stats compared to - say - basketball. I mean even to me it seems odd that there isn't a proper official tally for (arguably the most famous footballer ever) Pele's goals, or for (arguably the highest scoring player ever) Bican's record breaking haul. But if you come from watching another sport where they have collected every bit of data for every player for years it must seem really odd that no-one can agree on THE most important single stat for THE most important players.
I'm really interested in this and I'd like to hear what you guys think @Leo, @suspended, @linebaugh, @version on the following question and related ones that arise from it. Basketball fans give way more importance to (basketball) stats than football fans do (to football stats), why is this? A few possible answers come to mind for me...
Is it because basketball is better able to be described than football by stats?
Is it cos they have developed stats that better describe basketball than for football (ie it's not fundamentally easier to model, but people have put time into developing better stats)?
Is it just cos Americans like stats better when it comes to sport?
Is it a mixture of all of the above?
Is it something else?
I certainly feel that football stats that we are given come nowhere near to capturing the game - for example if they say Team A has 8 shots and 3 of them were on target and Team B had 12 shots with 2 on target then that certainly doesn't tell you who was the better team, in fact, I'd say that without knowing how hard the shots were and how far out they came from and even what exactly counts as a shot, it doesn't even tell you who had the better chances. You could of course do it better, you could split it into shots from within the 6 yard box and within the 18 yard box and outside that. You could also say something develop some kind of metric about how powerful the shots were and so on, but eventually you will be getting to a simple description of every shot and at some point it stops being stats and becomes a literal description of the game.
But then maybe if you combine the above with each team's possession and territory (where the game was played) and maybe even a more sophisticated thing that combined territory and possession ie how much each team had the ball and where they were when they had it. Well, that would tell you something.
But I feel like every football stat is like that. De Bruyne passed with 90 percent accuracy and Maguire with 94 percent... but unless you know how hard those passes were to make, where they were played, if they went forwards or backwards or sideways... same with a forward's strike rate or a keeper's number of saves and so on... in fact once I saw a statistician arguing that Ferguson was wrong to pick Van der Saar over another keeper cos he the other keeper had a lower percentage of goals from shots on target than VdS which is a totally ludicrous thing to say without knowing how difficult all the shots in question were, but more than that, it said nothing about how the positioning of the two keepers, how they dealt with crosses, with one-on-ones, how good they were at claiming long-balls, how good they were at marshalling the defence and at distribution... and so on. Also it didn't mention the opposition and as the reserve keeper likely faced weaker opposition and played in less important games it wouldn't be surprising if the quality of opposition he faced was lower.
I've got more to say on this but I'd like to hear what you lot think.
My main question to the Americans is - do you feel that the stats describe basketball well?
I know you have all these "advanced stats" for individual players (dunno about teams), do you think they are good and can you explain them to me?
I'm really interested in this and I'd like to hear what you guys think @Leo, @suspended, @linebaugh, @version on the following question and related ones that arise from it. Basketball fans give way more importance to (basketball) stats than football fans do (to football stats), why is this? A few possible answers come to mind for me...
Is it because basketball is better able to be described than football by stats?
Is it cos they have developed stats that better describe basketball than for football (ie it's not fundamentally easier to model, but people have put time into developing better stats)?
Is it just cos Americans like stats better when it comes to sport?
Is it a mixture of all of the above?
Is it something else?
I certainly feel that football stats that we are given come nowhere near to capturing the game - for example if they say Team A has 8 shots and 3 of them were on target and Team B had 12 shots with 2 on target then that certainly doesn't tell you who was the better team, in fact, I'd say that without knowing how hard the shots were and how far out they came from and even what exactly counts as a shot, it doesn't even tell you who had the better chances. You could of course do it better, you could split it into shots from within the 6 yard box and within the 18 yard box and outside that. You could also say something develop some kind of metric about how powerful the shots were and so on, but eventually you will be getting to a simple description of every shot and at some point it stops being stats and becomes a literal description of the game.
But then maybe if you combine the above with each team's possession and territory (where the game was played) and maybe even a more sophisticated thing that combined territory and possession ie how much each team had the ball and where they were when they had it. Well, that would tell you something.
But I feel like every football stat is like that. De Bruyne passed with 90 percent accuracy and Maguire with 94 percent... but unless you know how hard those passes were to make, where they were played, if they went forwards or backwards or sideways... same with a forward's strike rate or a keeper's number of saves and so on... in fact once I saw a statistician arguing that Ferguson was wrong to pick Van der Saar over another keeper cos he the other keeper had a lower percentage of goals from shots on target than VdS which is a totally ludicrous thing to say without knowing how difficult all the shots in question were, but more than that, it said nothing about how the positioning of the two keepers, how they dealt with crosses, with one-on-ones, how good they were at claiming long-balls, how good they were at marshalling the defence and at distribution... and so on. Also it didn't mention the opposition and as the reserve keeper likely faced weaker opposition and played in less important games it wouldn't be surprising if the quality of opposition he faced was lower.
I've got more to say on this but I'd like to hear what you lot think.
My main question to the Americans is - do you feel that the stats describe basketball well?
I know you have all these "advanced stats" for individual players (dunno about teams), do you think they are good and can you explain them to me?
Leo
Well-known member
I don't know much of anything about your football but US sports nerds/geeks have applied lots of new stats to American sports, just read the sports stories on FiveThirtyEight for an idea.
In baseball, batters used to have only batting average (number hit divided by number of at bats), singles/doubles/triples/home runs, and RBIs (runs batted in). Now they also have on-base percentage, slugging percentage, WAR (wins above replacement), runs created, runs created per 27 outs, walk to strikeout ratio, isolated power, secondary average, etc. Pitchers used to have wins-loses, strikeouts, and ERA (earned run average), where now they also have WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched), pitches per start, etc. It's basically what "Moneyball" was all about.
I have to believe football coaches and teams have pretty detailed stats on players, there's too much money on the line to go with gut instinct.
In baseball, batters used to have only batting average (number hit divided by number of at bats), singles/doubles/triples/home runs, and RBIs (runs batted in). Now they also have on-base percentage, slugging percentage, WAR (wins above replacement), runs created, runs created per 27 outs, walk to strikeout ratio, isolated power, secondary average, etc. Pitchers used to have wins-loses, strikeouts, and ERA (earned run average), where now they also have WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched), pitches per start, etc. It's basically what "Moneyball" was all about.
I have to believe football coaches and teams have pretty detailed stats on players, there's too much money on the line to go with gut instinct.