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Activity Number: 473 - For the Love of the Game: Applications of Statistics in Sports
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, July 31, 2019 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
Abstract #305284 Presentation
Title: Soccer Analytics with Two Sheets of Paper and a Pencil
Author(s): Michael Rutter*
Companies: Penn State Behrend
Keywords: Sports; Soccer; Mixed Models; Data Collection
Abstract:

In the fall of 2018, I had the opportunity to be the statistician for the North East Grape Pickers varsity boys soccer team (for which my son sporadically played defense). Normally, the "statistician" records shots, goals, assists, and saves for recording keeping. Very little useful information about team performance is relayed to the coach. Based on my experience as an off-ice statistician for Division I women's ice hockey, I quickly developed a way to chart shots, giveaways, takeaways, and defensive stops in real time. In this talk, I will describe how I developed some rudimentary spatial plus/minus statistics that I was able to relay to the coach during halftime and how these statistics tracked with team success. There is also the potential to estimate "expected goals", a statistic often used by professional soccer teams based on data collected via video. Using public available results, I will also describe my attempts to model expected goals for a high school soccer team while taking into account (1) this is high school, not a professional league; (2) I have a season of data for one team, but only single games for the other teams; and (3) questionable spatial resolution.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

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