PLFantasy

When trying to obtain data for use in any kind of forecast you are faced with any number of questions with varying degrees of complication. Is the data from a reliable source? Do we have enough of it? How should it be interpreted? When is it stable enough to be relied upon? That latter question is where this post will focus. Generally, more data is better than less data. Nate Silver fans’ ears will prick up at that simplistic statement as his excellent book The Signal and the Noise is full of instances where too much data can cloud our judgement, but for our purposes let’s say that when trying to judge the quality of a team you’d prefer to have data for 10 games rather than 5 (data from every game in Liverpool history would start to be too ‘noisy’ as Bill Shankly or Ian Rush have little bearing on the current crop of players). After two games last season, Everton had amassed 42 shots (26 SiB) giving them a crazy 21(13) average. While the team played well the rest of the way, their...

Personally, I've just wrapped up one of the best and almost certainly most important years of my life, having got married, travelled to four continents, finally got a new job and bought a house. For this blog though, the results have been less promising. I considered charting the quality of content here with my life developments or perhaps dousing the fire of my own work but given that I'm still travelling I'll stick to simple words for now. Long story short, I've had priorities which have trumped this blog which meant that (a) the weekly content has suffered (and stopped at the end of the last season) and (b) I totally ignored this year's pre season activities. My policy has always been to only post things which are worth reading so I didn't ever want to mail anything in with out of date data or banal narratives. I wasn't sure I could make a quality preseason guide so I didn't and I wasn't sure if I'd even be back for this year. Now it's...