Nice post on SI.com mentioning StatDNA from yesterday.   http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/news/20120305/monday-musings/

There has been a great deal of hubbub surrounding Swansea City Football Club lately.  The Welsh team sits a comfortable 9 points above the relegation zone whose confines they were widely tipped to finish within. Now they are media darlings, champions of the beautiful game in a league which neglects the subtler aspects of the sport in favor of a more physical brand of play. Some have even likened the style of Brendan Rodgers’ Swans to that of Barcelona, with Leon Britton, apparently, Xavi’s British twin!      Indulging the claims of the Swansea-Barca likene... [More]

A nice case study written up about us in SportsPro's March edition, attached in PDF format.   StatDNA SportsPro.pdf (666.40 kb)

"We had so many chances in the game, so many opportunities to get a shot on target. I was starting to wonder if it was going to be one of those days." -- Manchester United's Michael Carrick, after his side's 2-0 victory away to QPR in December   A common footballing frustration. So many chances, not much to show for it. But not all chances are created equal. At StatDNA, we've developed models to quantify just how good a chance really is. Last year we introduced our Goal Creation Framework, a decomposition of how goals are created, which includes pieces for Shot Quality and Finishing Qua... [More]

  I read a tweet a few weeks ago from a Liverpool fan about how opposing goalkeepers always seem to play their best match against Liverpool, and citing the fact that five opposing goalkeepers had been selected Man of the Match this season.  StatDNA has a statistic that measures how many goals a goalkeeper was expected to let in, given the quality of the finishes he’s faced, so I decided to use this statistic to see how valid the claim was.   In mathematical terms we’re measuring the expected value (EV) of the shots on target that the goalkeeper faced (excluding pena... [More]

StatDNA is very excited to announce that onfooty.com's Sarah Rudd has joined us as Vice President, Analytics and Software Development.  We couldn't think of a better addition to our team, Sarah's obviously well known for her soccer analytics acumen to all of her blog followers (not to mention that she won StatDNA's analytics competition), and she also brings tremendous skills in software development from working in search engine customization at Microsoft.  You can look for blog posts from Sarah on StatDNA.com in the months to come, as well as continued posts on her own blog. ... [More]

This is the final guest post from the research competition and was submitted by Eric Parziale, an undergraduate student and Dr. Philip Yates, a faculty member, both from the Department of Mathematics at the St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont.   Every soccer player has to answer the question, “When I get the ball, what do I do with it?”  There are lots of options.  Depending on the situation in which a player finds himself or herself, they may pass the ball to a teammate, kick the ball out of bounds, clear the ball upfield, dribble, hit the ball ... [More]

The following guest post is from Andres G. Abad, Ph. D of the Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL), Ecuador.   Introduction   Soccer, just like any other interesting game, is a game of possibilities. More specifically, it is a game of decisions. Players are required to become efficient decision makers in a highly dynamic, rapidly changing, uncertain environment. Additionally, players are required to make these decisions in quite short periods of time. On top of that, other factors such as fatigue, game pressure, stress, and anxiety may burden even more a player's deci... [More]