sports
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Is Backing the Favourite A Winning Strategy?
Backing the favourite is a common (and easiest) strategy in horse racing. Instead of guessing, I wanted to examine the numbers to see whether this was effective. In this post, I’m using race data, Starting Price (SP) odds, and a few Excel pivot tables to answer a basic question: Do favourites win often enough to… Read more
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Building a Football Prediction Model: Week 4
This week I am adding a time series model (SARIMA) to better react to team momentum and dips in form. Again, I am predicting matches days ahead of time to increase transparency. What is SARIMA? Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) is a time-series forecasting model designed to predict future values based on historical patterns.… Read more
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Ranking clubs by the state of their finances
It’s well known that Premier League clubs make a lot of money. But I was curious about something different: which clubs are actually well run financially? To answer that, I built a small Python model to rank football clubs based on their financial health. Instead of league position or trophies, this looks purely at how… Read more
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Building a Football Prediction model: Week 2
Summary To the nearest whole number, the model predicted the correct goals scored for 10 out of the 20 teams, giving a strong accuracy of 50%. Since last week, I’ve made a few changes to my model. I’ve downweighted past results exponentially and added the factor of recent form (last 5 matches) to influence the… Read more
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Building a Football Prediction Model: Week 1
Passionate about football and data, I want to see if it’s possible to program a model to give me a consistently accurate prediction of a football match. This series of posts attempts to document my experiences in building a model that will predict games. Background One thing I found from reading papers is that a… Read more
