Statistics Through Football
Probability distributions from the ground up, from penalties and goals to streaks and transfer fees, then the methods that use them, one football question at a time.
18 parts Beginner to Intermediate
Start at part 1Learn
Statistics, maths and machine learning, each one introduced through a football question.
Each series starts at part 1, and every piece builds on the one before. New to the notation? The glossary explains every symbol, and the cheat sheet puts the methods side by side.
Which series first?
A suggested route, not a rule. Each step builds on the one before; skip what you already know.
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1
Statistics Through Football
18 parts · Beginner to Intermediate
Distributions, averages, variation and uncertainty. Everything else uses it.
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2
Bayesian Thinking Through Football
8 parts · Beginner to Advanced
Update what you believe as new evidence arrives.
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3
Linear Algebra Through Football
10 parts · Beginner to Advanced
Players, positions and passing networks as lists and grids of numbers.
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4
Calculus Through Football
6 parts · Beginner to Intermediate
Movement, change, and how models learn.
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5
Machine Learning Through Football
20 parts · Beginner to Advanced
Features, training, testing, overfitting and validation, built on all four.
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6
Decision Science Through Football
13 parts · Beginner to Advanced
Put it all to work on real football decisions.
Side route, any time
Game Theory Through FootballFootball as a contest of choices: penalties, tactics and the rules themselves, and what the best decision looks like when the other side is thinking too.
Side route, any time
Cause and Effect Through FootballDid the sacking, the signing or the new system cause it, or would it have happened anyway? How to find a fair comparison for the season that never happened. Best after Statistics.
Linear Algebra Through Football
Vectors and matrices, and the maths behind player similarity, runs and passes, formations, ratings and PCA.
10 parts Beginner to Advanced
Start at part 1Bayesian Thinking Through Football
How to update what you believe about a team or a player as the evidence comes in, and where the starting beliefs come from.
8 parts Beginner to Advanced
Start at part 1Machine Learning Through Football
How models learn from past matches to predict the next one: features and targets, training and testing, and the traps in between.
20 parts Beginner to Advanced
Start at part 1Calculus Through Football
Rates of change, from how quickly a winger gets up to speed to how models learn: derivatives and integrals without the fear.
6 parts Beginner to Intermediate
Start at part 1Game Theory Through Football
Football as a contest of choices: penalties, tactics and the rules themselves, and what the best decision looks like when the other side is thinking too.
12 parts Beginner to Advanced
Start at part 1Decision Science Through Football
Operations research on the pitch and in the boardroom: signings under a budget, squads, schedules and set pieces, and how to choose well when you can't try every option.
13 parts Beginner to Advanced
Start at part 1Cause and Effect Through Football
Did the sacking, the signing or the new system cause it, or would it have happened anyway? How to find a fair comparison for the season that never happened. Best after Statistics.
7 parts Beginner to Intermediate
Start at part 1Latest parts
Are TV games duller? Hypothesis tests and p-values
Premiership games moved from Saturday 3pm, mostly for television, have more goals, and a shuffle test says the gap is no fluke. How a hypothesis test works, what a p-value does and doesn't tell you, and why this one still isn't about the cameras.
Beginner Part 18 of Statistics Through Football
Is a half-time lead worth what it looks like? Matching like with like
Sides a goal up at half-time win 70% of the time; sides level win 32%. But the sides in front were usually the better sides before kick-off. Matching each leader with level sides that were just as fancied beforehand shows what the lead itself is worth, and what matching can never fix.
Intermediate Part 7 of Cause and Effect Through Football
Sacked after a bad run, poached after a good one. Event studies
Line up every Premiership manager change by the day it happened and look game by game. Sides that sacked their manager were sinking and then bounced; sides whose manager was poached were flying and then fell back. The line before the change tells you why it happened, and both end up where the club usually is.
Intermediate Part 6 of Cause and Effect Through Football
Does kicking first win shootouts? Randomised experiments, and how many you need
A coin toss decides who kicks first in a shootout, which makes it a real experiment. In StatsBomb's open data the side kicking first won 18 of 36, exactly half. Why that settles nothing, and how many shootouts it would take to tell.
Intermediate Part 5 of Cause and Effect Through Football