7 ms·

Predicting Football Results with Statistical Modelling

69 points by henrik_w 6y ago

garraeth 6y ago
Perhaps include "(soccer)" in the title for those of us in the USA?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mattmanser 6y ago
  Not the rest of the world's problem you called a game that mainly involves throwing 'foot' ball for some incomprehensible reason. Are you sure about the name basketball? Don't want to call it sackball or something like that? Or maybe shuttlebasket? I always chortle at your "world" series too!
  - mcphage 6y ago
    > Don't want to call it sackball or something like that? Or maybe shuttlebasket? What?
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Surely it should be called netball, since baskets haven't been involved for more than a century.
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netball
  - retsibsi 6y ago
    I was going to respond with the factoid about the World Series being named after a newspaper, but a Wikipedia check (and subsequent googling) revealed that it's probably false. Not news to you, but maybe of interest to others who, like me, had absorbed the popular misconception!
  - pretendscholar 6y ago
    American Football is actually based on the delineation between sports played on horseback and on foot. So maybe it is an antiquated distinction but it makes sense. Maybe we can rename it infantryball.
- bloodorange 6y ago
  That's like saying 'Perhaps include "(France)" in the title' when talking about Paris. Football is well known all over the world and perahps the most popular spectator sport.
- superfrank 6y ago
  The author is from London and the internet is global. Expecting an author to cater to every other culture with everything they do is a bit self-centered, IMO. It should be on the reader to understand that there are differences, not on the writer to make sure every single cultural difference is pointed out. It seems kind of weird to expect him to alter his headline to cater to a country he doesn't live in. If you were writing an article about potato chips, it would seem kind of silly to expect you to add "(crisps)" in the title to cater to our English friends, so I'm not sure why you would expect that here, especially when the vast majority of the world calls it "football".
  - darkerside 6y ago
    In fairness, it's not uncommon to specify "American football" for international audiences, so I don't think it's totally unreasonable. But on balance, adding a parenthetical word into a headline is just a little too much to ask. There's not much harm in bringing in someone who was expecting one but got the other anyway.
- xapata 6y ago
  I think it's reasonable for someone in the USA to expect that "Football" could refer to 1 of 3 popular games -- American football, soccer, or rugby.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Why? Does it really matter what shape the ball is?
ardillamorris 6y ago
I just read this whole thing to find out it didn't work... :(
- bjourne 6y ago
  If it had worked. Do you think he would have blogged about it? :)
whofw 6y ago
One of my professors was working on a PHD research project involving predicting soccer match outcomes using a neural net. At that time it was very...wrong...but I wonder if he ever made any progress towards better accuracy.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  If it was very wrong, did you consider just inverting the answer?
  - whofw 6y ago
    Inaccurate would probably be a better word. The results were fairly inconsistent, and for whatever reason he decided that he wanted to bet real money before perfecting (or at least as best as possible) the predictions and he lost a lot of money haha
thom 6y ago
The same author does seem to go on and build a slightly more realistic Dixon-Coles model: https://dashee87.github.io/football/python/predicting-football-results-with-statistical-modelling-dixon-coles-and-time-weighting/ https://dashee87.github.io/football/python/predicting-footba... But even that is very dated - one of the authors, Stuart Coles has worked at a gambling syndicate for many years. They at the very least incorporate expected goals into the model, but no doubt have all sorts of esoteric models by now.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  Yep, Dixon-Coles is way out now. Generally, Poisson-based models don't work that well. They model some aspects of the game correctly but not others. And when it is bad, it is terrible (their paper was genius though, and changed the industry). You also wouldn't do the one-hot/regression stuff on teams, as there is so much player-level data...some kind of online, off/def model is useful though. You also have the issue of modelling a bivariate as two independent univariates. The adjustments made by the authors were intended to get around this problem but there has been a lot more work on this aspect of the problem since then, and a few new solutions. And you are right, expected goals was cutting-edge back in ~2011-12 but even some clubs have caught on now. Most gambling syndicates, afaik, actually produce their own datasets (the largest ones employ a huge number of people, I know one that started up five years ago and already has ~10 PHds on staff + traders + data people, etc.). I will say though, it is surprising how inefficient betting markets were until recently. In the early part of the 2010s, I imagine that large syndicates were making, conservatively, 300-400%/year in the largest markets that were, apparently, "unbeatable". I am aware of very simple models, similar to DC, that could beat retail bookies on Brier for EPL as recently as 2017. And, ofc, smaller markets are far softer (or other sports). At the cutting edge, yes...it probably is complex (I have no idea). But a surprising amount is actually just doing the simple things well.
  - fastbluewave 6y ago
    Any pointers or papers for someone who's just getting into this?
sammyjoe72 6y ago
Remember, no one wins at gambling by picking winners, you need to look for value and find where the bookmakers have miss-priced a team in a match. Then you have to deal with all the corrupt behaviours the sports internet bookies will deploy to limit their exposure to you, which is the other reason why you won’t win.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  time for a cryptographically secure and open betting platform that probably already exists but nobody is using!
- hogFeast 6y ago
  Professionals don't use retail bookies, they bet with Asian books who take action from sharps (Pinny, SBOBet, SingBet, IBC...although it varies, sometimes their lines are soft).
- disown 6y ago
  > Remember, no one wins at gambling by picking winners, you need to look for value and find where the bookmakers have miss-priced a team in a match. No. You win by being the bookie or better yet, by not gambling. Sports betting is worse than a zero sum game because you gotta pay the bookie too. I'm betting that 99.99999% of everyone who bets on sports loses money.

69 points by henrik_w 6y ago

garraeth 6y ago

Perhaps include "(soccer)" in the title for those of us in the USA?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 6y ago
Not the rest of the world's problem you called a game that mainly involves throwing 'foot' ball for some incomprehensible reason. Are you sure about the name basketball? Don't want to call it sackball or something like that? Or maybe shuttlebasket? I always chortle at your "world" series too!
- mcphage 6y ago
  > Don't want to call it sackball or something like that? Or maybe shuttlebasket? What?
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Surely it should be called netball, since baskets haven't been involved for more than a century.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netball https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netball
- retsibsi 6y ago
  I was going to respond with the factoid about the World Series being named after a newspaper, but a Wikipedia check (and subsequent googling) revealed that it's probably false. Not news to you, but maybe of interest to others who, like me, had absorbed the popular misconception!
- pretendscholar 6y ago
  American Football is actually based on the delineation between sports played on horseback and on foot. So maybe it is an antiquated distinction but it makes sense. Maybe we can rename it infantryball.
bloodorange 6y ago
That's like saying 'Perhaps include "(France)" in the title' when talking about Paris. Football is well known all over the world and perahps the most popular spectator sport.
superfrank 6y ago
The author is from London and the internet is global. Expecting an author to cater to every other culture with everything they do is a bit self-centered, IMO. It should be on the reader to understand that there are differences, not on the writer to make sure every single cultural difference is pointed out. It seems kind of weird to expect him to alter his headline to cater to a country he doesn't live in. If you were writing an article about potato chips, it would seem kind of silly to expect you to add "(crisps)" in the title to cater to our English friends, so I'm not sure why you would expect that here, especially when the vast majority of the world calls it "football".
- darkerside 6y ago
  In fairness, it's not uncommon to specify "American football" for international audiences, so I don't think it's totally unreasonable. But on balance, adding a parenthetical word into a headline is just a little too much to ask. There's not much harm in bringing in someone who was expecting one but got the other anyway.
xapata 6y ago
I think it's reasonable for someone in the USA to expect that "Football" could refer to 1 of 3 popular games -- American football, soccer, or rugby.
bigbubba 6y ago
Why? Does it really matter what shape the ball is?

ardillamorris 6y ago

I just read this whole thing to find out it didn't work... :(

bjourne 6y ago
If it had worked. Do you think he would have blogged about it? :)

whofw 6y ago

One of my professors was working on a PHD research project involving predicting soccer match outcomes using a neural net. At that time it was very...wrong...but I wonder if he ever made any progress towards better accuracy.

oh_sigh 6y ago
If it was very wrong, did you consider just inverting the answer?
- whofw 6y ago
  Inaccurate would probably be a better word. The results were fairly inconsistent, and for whatever reason he decided that he wanted to bet real money before perfecting (or at least as best as possible) the predictions and he lost a lot of money haha

thom 6y ago

The same author does seem to go on and build a slightly more realistic Dixon-Coles model: https://dashee87.github.io/football/python/predicting-football-results-with-statistical-modelling-dixon-coles-and-time-weighting/ https://dashee87.github.io/football/python/predicting-footba... But even that is very dated - one of the authors, Stuart Coles has worked at a gambling syndicate for many years. They at the very least incorporate expected goals into the model, but no doubt have all sorts of esoteric models by now.

hogFeast 6y ago
Yep, Dixon-Coles is way out now. Generally, Poisson-based models don't work that well. They model some aspects of the game correctly but not others. And when it is bad, it is terrible (their paper was genius though, and changed the industry). You also wouldn't do the one-hot/regression stuff on teams, as there is so much player-level data...some kind of online, off/def model is useful though. You also have the issue of modelling a bivariate as two independent univariates. The adjustments made by the authors were intended to get around this problem but there has been a lot more work on this aspect of the problem since then, and a few new solutions. And you are right, expected goals was cutting-edge back in ~2011-12 but even some clubs have caught on now. Most gambling syndicates, afaik, actually produce their own datasets (the largest ones employ a huge number of people, I know one that started up five years ago and already has ~10 PHds on staff + traders + data people, etc.). I will say though, it is surprising how inefficient betting markets were until recently. In the early part of the 2010s, I imagine that large syndicates were making, conservatively, 300-400%/year in the largest markets that were, apparently, "unbeatable". I am aware of very simple models, similar to DC, that could beat retail bookies on Brier for EPL as recently as 2017. And, ofc, smaller markets are far softer (or other sports). At the cutting edge, yes...it probably is complex (I have no idea). But a surprising amount is actually just doing the simple things well.
- fastbluewave 6y ago
  Any pointers or papers for someone who's just getting into this?

sammyjoe72 6y ago

Remember, no one wins at gambling by picking winners, you need to look for value and find where the bookmakers have miss-priced a team in a match. Then you have to deal with all the corrupt behaviours the sports internet bookies will deploy to limit their exposure to you, which is the other reason why you won’t win.

sushshshsh 6y ago
time for a cryptographically secure and open betting platform that probably already exists but nobody is using!
hogFeast 6y ago
Professionals don't use retail bookies, they bet with Asian books who take action from sharps (Pinny, SBOBet, SingBet, IBC...although it varies, sometimes their lines are soft).
disown 6y ago
> Remember, no one wins at gambling by picking winners, you need to look for value and find where the bookmakers have miss-priced a team in a match. No. You win by being the bookie or better yet, by not gambling. Sports betting is worse than a zero sum game because you gotta pay the bookie too. I'm betting that 99.99999% of everyone who bets on sports loses money.