Alternative Football Form

In relative terms, football is a sport decided by infrequent scores. Compared to tennis, cricket, basketball and even rugby, which are defined by an accumulation of points over a prolonged period, football matches can hinge on just one play.

This often means the result isn’t a fair reflection of the match, yet most punting decisions are based on historical results.

Last season we experimented by judging games based on the ‘shots on target’ statistic. A Premier League team scores on average every 3.59 shots, therefore more shots on target should equal more goals and more points.

We found our edge when teams lost a match but ‘won’ in terms of shots on target because they were under bet in the future. Evidently, the betting public are conditioned by the result in the newspaper rather than the balance of play.

The one downside with this approach is that teams didn’t have many shots on target per game meaning results were often influenced by a small sample size.

To get round this problem we have focused on all shots – both on and off target.

On average a Premier League team scores every 10.2 shots and by looking at past results, we can find teams that didn’t get the result they deserved.

Example: Norwich v Everton (17 August 2013)

Result: Norwich 2 Everton 2
Total Shots: Norwich 8 Everton 20
Performance Judged Result: Norwich 0.78 Everton 1.96
Supremacy: Norwich -1.18 Everton 1.18

The supremacy is simply the difference between the hypothetical scores. Because this figure is on a continuous scale, rather than a football result displayed in whole integers, it should more accurately reflect the difference in performance between two teams.

Throughout the season we will aggregate these supremacies to form a league table that accurately rates performance. The aim being to discover teams that are playing better/worse than their positions in the ‘normal’ league table.