Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game (Bloomsbury Sigma)

by David Sumpter

Whenever it is reasonable to assume that events can happen unexpectedly, at any time, independently of how many events have happened prior to the next one, then it is reasonable to expect a Poisson distribution.

Sarah’s research paper and presentation has become something of a legend in the football analytics community.14 It was the very early days of football analytics, and most club analysts hadn’t yet got as far as sorting their player spreadsheets, let alone talking about expected goals. So when Sarah took the stage at the New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports at Harvard to present her ‘framework for tactical analysis and individual offensive production assessment in soccer using Markov chains’, she was moving into completely new territory.