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Similar Matches Finder

Describe a match by how far apart the two sides have been, and find the past Premiership matches most like it. What happened in them is the forecast.

Each gap is points per game, home side minus away side: over the last five matches, over this season so far, and over last season. Positive means the home side has been better. k is how many past matches the forecast is built from.

Try an example

Home win
Draw
Away win

The 20 nearest matches

    How it works

    Each gap is first measured in standard deviations, so the three count the same. Then the distance from your match to every past match is the straight-line gap between their three numbers:

    $$d = \sqrt{\Delta_1^2 + \Delta_2^2 + \Delta_3^2}$$

    In plain football

    • \(\Delta_1\) is how far a past match's form gap was from yours, \(\Delta_2\) the same for this season, \(\Delta_3\) for last season. A past match with exactly your gaps has \(d = 0\).
    • The forecast is the share of home wins, draws and away wins among the \(k\) nearest past matches, plus one imaginary match at the usual rates so no result is ever impossible.
    • The past matches are the 3,900 Premiership matches from 2001/02 to 2020/21. On the five seasons since, \(k = 300\) scored a log loss of 0.949, level with logistic regression.

    Drag \(k\) down to 5 and watch the forecast jump around: five matches are mostly luck. That's why the best \(k\) is so large.

    Where it goes wrong

    • It knows only results. Injuries, suspensions, transfers and new managers are invisible to it.
    • It sees gaps, not teams: the nearest matches to a derby can be any two sides that were the same distance apart.
    • It treats the three gaps as equally important, although recent form adds almost nothing once the season gaps are known.
    • Its past matches come from the Scottish Premiership, where two clubs have usually been far ahead of the rest.

    How it was built and tested: Matches like this one. K-nearest neighbours

    Results data from football-data.co.uk. These figures come from a statistical model and are for analysis and education. Football remains uncertain and model predictions will frequently be wrong.