Statistical Adjustment for "Prevent Defense" When Evaluating Team Performance in Soccer

Andrey Skripnikov Co-Author
New College of Florida
 
David Gillman Co-Author
New College of Florida
 
Ahmet Cemek First Author
New College of Florida
 
Andrey Skripnikov Presenting Author
New College of Florida
 
Tuesday, Aug 6: 9:50 AM - 10:05 AM
2694 
Contributed Papers 
Oregon Convention Center 
Having looked at the full match statistics for the England-France 2022 FIFA World Cup Quarterfinal, one could come away thinking "England lost despite having played better than France": 16 to 8 shot attempts, 8 to 5 shots on target, 5 corners to France's 2, resulting in a 1-2 loss. What's disregarded is the score situation: in the 40 minutes when the match was tied (0-0, 1-1), France led in all of the mentioned statistical categories, while consciously ceding initiative to England in the 66 minutes when up a goal - a tactic we'll refer to as "prevent defense" (term borrowed from American football). We use match event sequencing data across five European club leagues over the past 15 years to study impacts of prevent defense on the aforementioned statistical categories and goal-scoring tendencies for teams when trailing, leading or tied. For that we leverage categorical and count response modeling approaches with predictors that could reasonably affect the likelihood of a given team implementing prevent defense tactic, which would include, besides scoring differential, such aspects as prematch booking odds (to gauge the relative levels of opponents), red cards, time in the match.

Keywords

Sports statistics


Categorical data

Multivariate regression 

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Section on Statistics in Sports