It is true that the ball is round, that the statistical events of football are superior to those of many other sports and that football predictions usually hardly ever catch us. But as Info Data every year we lean on the shoulders of giants to provide our prediction. In our case, the giant is FiveThirtyEight.com, the site specializing in electoral and sports forecasting founded by Nate Silver, data journalist of data journalists who since 2009 has developed a statistical method of analysis of sports competitions and more. The Silver-method hit the headlines during the 2008 US presidential election when it announced Barack Obama’s victory. In any case, this year Inter will win, ahead of Milan and Napoli. Juventus in seventh position even surpassed by Lazio. A debacle.
It must be said that last year the forecast said: 31% probabilities for theInter to win the Scudetto against a 22% of the Juventus it’s a 12% that they are to triumph Atalanta o Milan. We saw that the response of the camp was different. This year l‘Inter it is given at 36% against 17 of Milan and 12% of Napoli.
At this point the question is legitimate. How does Nate Silver’s algorithm work?
What does the Soccer Player Index measure?
Il Soccer Player Index (Spi) published (and continuously updated here on FiveThirtyEight) counts over 630 teams belonging to more than 30 different competitions worldwide. His goal is to evaluate each team for its overall “strength”, dividing it into offensive and defensive ratings.
These two ratings respectively represent the number of goals scored and conceded in a hypothetical match played against the “average team” in a neutral field, and combined with each other.they go precisely to produce the Soccer Player Index (SPI) which expresses the percentage of points (3 for win, 1 for draw and 0 for defeat) ch the formation examined would be able to obtain if the test match were played continuously
So each team has an offensive rating which represents the number of goals one would expect to score against an average team on neutral ground and a defensive rating which represents the number of goals one would expect to concede. These ratings, in turn, produce an overall SPI rating, which represents the percentage of points available – a win is worth 3 points, a draw is worth 1 point, and a loss is worth 0 points – one would expect the team to take that match were they played over and over again.
How to calculate the predictions of individual matches.
Given the SPI scores of two teams, the process of generating the odds of winning / losing / drawing for a given match is threefold. As explained on the site: they calculate the number of expected goals that each team will score during the match. These predicted match scores represent the number of goals each team would have to score to keep their offensive score exactly the same as the one that was about to start the match, and are tailored for a league-specific home court advantage and for the match. importance of the match for each team. Then through the simulation of the Poisson stochastic process two distributions are generated which give the probability that each team will not score goals, one goal, two goals, etc. Finally, the two distributions are transformed into a matrix of all possible match scores, from which the probability of victory, defeat or draw for each team can be calculated. Here you will find the complete methodology.
And now three numbers of the Serie A championship
The source is the Transfermarkt database, one of the most important sites that deals with data related to football, to present the new season.
610 mln
The most expensive squad in Serie A. It is fromInter and is expressed in euros. They follow the Juventus con 525 and the Milan con 521 million euros. Last is the Lecce with 42.8 million euros. In practice, the Inter team is worth 25 times more than Lecce. Of course, the transfer market is not finished so these numbers must be recorded as of today 13 August 2022.
4,6 mld
Serie A value drops. Four hundred and six thousand euros is the total value of the cards of the players of the top league. Last year it was worth 5 billion.
26.1 years
The average age of the players of the A league. It drops slightly compared to last season (26.5). The oldest team is theInter (27.5) followed by Sampdoria (27,1) and Monza. The youngest is Lecce. Among the Big, the youngest are Roma e Napoli. Last year last in the standings the Milanwhich with an average of 24.8 years is the youngest team in the league. And he won the championship.
To know more.
How much do football players’ agents cost? Spoiler: Serie A has some problems
The pandemic has “buffered” Serie A: 350 million euros in quarantine
Three numbers (plus one) on the Serie A championship which starts tomorrow