By David Butler

This is the fifth season where we will follow the pundit to consider the predictive success of Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson and BBC pundit Mark Lawrenson for English Premier League matches.

A similar pattern has emerged over the past few seasons – in any given gameweek the pundits typically call half of the outcomes correctly. Typically they get one score line correct too.  For 17/18 season if you were to place €1 on each of their score line predictions, Lawrenson would have turned a profit of €58.81 by predicting 12% of the score lines correctly. Following Merson's score line estimates with a €1 stake per match rendered a loss of -€47.77.

The table below is for the first week of fixtures for this season based on a €1 stake. I look at betting on the score lines suggested by the pundits and also just on the outcomes.

By John Considine.

There were important competition structure changes introduced to both hurling and gaelic football in 2018.  Both sporting codes saw a round-robin element introduced.  The hurling competition changed to a structure that much of the sporting world recognises.  The first stage of the competition is now round-robin and the second stage of the competition is knockout.  It is not dissimilar to the competition structure in the major US sports where there is a regular and post-season part.  The new gaelic football format has a round-robin element sandwiched between two knockout stages.

Many team sporting competitions end with a knock-out component.  The round-robin gives fixity-of-fixtures and the knockout element helps build excitement for the fans.

The purpose of this post is to quantify the implication for spectators numbers, i.e. those passing through the turnstiles (TV audiences are another matter).  What follows are the numbers for the Munster senior hurling competition.  A similar analysis can be performed for the Leinster competition.

The 2018 change to the competition structure of the Munster Senior Hurling Championship had the expected impact on attendances.  By moving to a round-robin structure the number of games increased and so too did the total attendance.  The 2017 competition had 4 games, namely, a quarter-final, two semi-finals, and a final.  A total of 127,992 spectators passed through the turnstiles.  The 2018 competition had 11 games.  There were 10 round-robin games and a final.  There were 248,809 spectators for these 11 games.  The average number of spectators per game declined while the overall numbers increased.

It is not possible to say much more because the 11 games in the 2018 were played at four different venues with varying capacity constraints.  For example, the game between Limerick and Clare was played in Ennis with the capacity limited to under 19,000.  It is probably that over 30,000 would have attended if the stadium could have accommodated them.  Similarly, the Waterford game against Tipperary might have attracted closer to 20,000 if there was a stadium in Waterford with that capacity.  By contrast, all four of the games in the 2017 championship were played in Thurles.

The change "worked" in Munster because the county teams are close to each other on the field and geographically.  The experiment is likely to survive.  The evidence is less clear cut for the new football round-robin.

By Robbie Butler

For the first time in many years, September will not see the traditional commencement or continuation of a UEFA qualifying group for a major championships. Instead next month UEFA members will take a step into the unknown with the start of the UEFA Nations League.

This new format appears to have two main purposes; the elimination of friendly matches from the fixture calendar; and secondly, offering an entry point to the 2020 UEFA European Championships. While the former is very much welcome, the latter might be less so given the competition structure of the new league. 

With 55 teams set to take part, countries will be divided into four groups based on international performance over the past number of years. Group A includes the likes of Belgium, France and Germany. The Republic of Ireland are in Group B (second-tier) along with countries such as Russia and Sweden. Group C contains weaker nations again such as Bulgaria, Finland and Albania, while Group D comprises of the traditionally weakest teams such as Malta, Latvia and San Marino. 

The good news for the minnows is that they not only get to play one another, and therefore have a golden opportunity to register a rare international win, the winner of this group also qualifies for the 2020 European Championships. This poses an obvious question? Is a country better-off targeting a place in Group D rather than Group C? This logic can apply to Group C/B and Group B/A. 

It will be interest to see how this plays out in the months and years ahead. It may be that some tweaking of the competition structure is required. This is certainly not unusual for new competitions.

By Sean O Connor
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Designing a methodology to quantify performance can be open to debate. Individuals can have different preferences of what should be more important when measuring how a team has performed. For instance, in a cup competition, should a strong team progressing to a semi-final be seen as performing better than a weaker team progressing to a quarter final, but knocking an extremely strong team out on the way?

Even the official ranking methodology utilised by FIFA to quantify international team performance can be open to criticism, particularly when you read stories about how teams such as Wales were able to rise up the rankings by forgoing friendly games.

Nonetheless, this post attempts to quantify how teams in this summer’s World Cup performed utilising an experimental methodology. The methodology can be summarised as follows.

World Cup performance in a game is based on the following;

• 3 points are awarded for each win in the group stage and knockout stage.
• 1 point is given for a draw for both teams.
• 0.5 points is given if a team is knocked out in penalties in the group stage.
• Winning the 3rd and 4th place play-off is only worth 2.5 points
• Winning the final is worth 3.5 points
• 0 points are given for a loss in 90 minutes in the group or knockout stage.
• I control for goals scored and conceded.
• I control for the team and opponents strength by using the FIFA ranking points given out on the June 7th 2018.

The method to calculate a score in a game is as follows;

Points for game i = (((Points in game after final whistle j + (Goals scored – Less Goals conceded)) * (FIFA Ranking of team j – (+/- Difference in FIFA Ranking of Opposition))

Prior to presenting the results here are some examples of calculating scores.

In the opening game of the tournament, Russia beat Egypt 5-0. For the latest FIFA rankings, Russia had 493 points, while Egypt had 465, therefore Russia where 28 points higher than Egypt. Russia’s points accumulated for this game would have been the following;(((3+ (5-0))*(493-28)) Russia would have gained 3,720 points for this game.

For the thrilling 3-3 between Spain and Portugal, Portugal would have accumulated 1,126 points, while Spain would have been given 1,274. The difference for this is that Portugal is considered a stronger side to Spain in the FIFA rankings. The Figure below plots team performance based on the methodology described above.

The red bars indicate the teams which progressed to the knockout stages, while the blue bars highlight those who left after the group games. According to the methodology adopted here, France and Belgium performed strongest at this World Cup. South Korea performed better than many teams who reached the knockout stages. This high ranking is no doubt due to their clean sheet victory over Germany and the circa 1,000 point difference between the two teams in the FIFA ranking charts.

Like all methodologies’ the metrics generated here has flaws, namely it gives no credit to poor teams who may hold a very good team to a narrow defeat. Moreover, two strong teams drawing or one beating another is has more a less the same impact of two weak teams drawing or beating one another. Similarly, it would be worthwhile to control for a countries population, given how larger countries tend to outperform smaller ones, given the pool of talent they have to choose from. Future posts, may try to account for this, along with control for other factors.   

By David Butler

Fulham recently signed striker Aleksandar Mitrovic for a reported £22m transfer fee from Newcastle. Mitrovic scored 12 goals in 20 games in the 17/18 Championship while on loan at Fulham. The Serbian international wasn’t Fulham’s top goal scorer last season but held an impressive goal-to-game ratio.

Stepping up to the Premier League for Championship goalscorers is always a difficult task. While I doubt anyone would expect a Championship player to replicate their form at a higher level, measuring the gap between second and first tier football interests me.

The table below tracks the top goal scorers for promoted clubs since the start of the Premier League. Each player’s goal to game (GTG) ratio for the season in which they are promoted (Tier 2 - GTG Ratio) is compared to their Premier League goal to game ratio for their first season in the top flight (Tier 1 - GTG Ratio). Some players are excluded as they were transferred out, their contract expired or they incurred a serious injury (e.g. Tommy Moonie, David Speedie, Iwan Roberts and Svetoslav Todorov). For two others I couldn’t get the data from Soccerbase.com (Stan Collymore and Gifton Noel-Williams).  
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With the exception of Andy Carroll (Newcastle), all of the other promoted top goalscorers saw a decrease in their GTG ratio when promoted. This would be expected, and is probably due to various factors associated with playing at a higher level, some of which may not be solely down to the individual in question (i.e. clubs may bring in new talent that take penalties etc.) 

Some interesting cases arise. John McGinlay (Bolton) seems to be one of the first tier-two goalscorers that just couldn’t replicate his early form in the Premier League. From time-to-time we see these interesting cases, where prolific goalscorers at a tier two level, can’t make the grade. Twice McGinlay was top goalscorer for Bolton during promotion seasons, with GTG ratios of 0.43 and 0.61. These fell to 0.19 and 0.20 respectively upon promotion. Bolton played in the 95/96 season and McGinlay was sold during the 97/98 Premier League campaign – perhaps the club learned from past mistakes.

Despite the GTG ratio decline some players still stepped up to the mark in the Premier League – Charlie Austin (QPR), Andy Johnson (Crystal Palace) and, of course, Kevin Phillips (Sunderland) are examples of players with an impressive GTG ratio following promotion. Other scored plenty of goals too in their first season despite having more game time. Examples include Dean Sturridge (Derby), Chris Armstrong (Crystal Palace), Matt Jansen (Blackburn), Michael Ricketts (Bolton), Marlon Harewood (West Ham) and Grant Holt (Norwich).

At the other end of the spectrum, several top goal scorers for promoted clubs have tanked spectacularly in terms of appearances and GTG ratio; Craig Maskell (Swindon) and David Connolly (Sunderland) both failed to score with their promoted club but neither received much of an opportunity. Graham Dorrans (WBA), Abel Taarabt (QPR), and last season Dwight Gayle (Newcastle) and Elias Kachunga (Huddersfield), are examples of goalscorers at a Championship level who appeared plenty of times but didn’t come anywhere close to replicating the goals they scored the previous season.

Perhaps others are victims of their own success. Pierre van Hooijdonk stand outs. The Dutchman has one of the most impressive tier-two records from the list, scoring 34 goals in 46 games when Nottingham Forrest were promoted from the second tier. Upon promotion, van Hooijdonk went on strike due to the on-goings at the club and only agreed to return in November. He didn’t play as much and scored just 7 times. Forrest duly finished bottom.

One final case is noteworthy; that of Marcus Stewart (Sunderland). In the 2004-2005 Championship season, Stewart fired the Black Cats to promotion scoring 17 goals in 46 appearances. The story goes however that at 33, Stewart  decided he was too old to play Premier League football, and instead opted to join Bristol City. 

While the GTG ratio’s are dispersed, on average, promoted top goalscorers are scoring one goal in just over every two games at a tier-two level. Once promoted to the Premier League, the average falls to one goal in just over every four games. Eyeballing the data, there doesn’t seem to be any trend. It’s not as if GTG ratio’s for these players are following any pattern over time.

With this in mind, it will be interesting to keep an eye on Mitrovic this season and all the top goalscorers for all promoted clubs. Expect Diogo Jota (Wolves), Junior Hoilett (Cardiff) and Ryan Sessegnon (Fulham) to face a tough season.

By John Considine

Last Saturday, as I travelled through County Offaly on my way from Nenagh to Nowlan Park, I listened to the commentary on the Hockey World Cup semi-final between Ireland and Spain.  The "national broadcaster" had sourced the commentary from BBC Radio 5 Live and expert analysis in the RTE Radio 1 studio was provided by Aine Connery.  Like her successors on the Irish hockey team, Aine did a superb job.  Ireland won and in the process became the first Irish team to qualify for a World Cup field-final.  An extraordinary achievement.

There was approximately 24 hours between the semi-finals and final.  Enough time for a fight about funding to breakout.  A dominant theme was that success was achieved despite the lack of government funding.  Echoes of a similar debate surrounding the Olympic success of Katie Taylor were audible.  (Interestingly, it was also suggested that the financial, and other, sacrifices made by the team contributed to their success.)

A response came from John Treacy - CEO of Sport Ireland (the government agency with responsibility for most sporting matters).  Tracey was reported as saying "They got €520k high performance, they got an additional €60k for both World Cup campaigns, and then they got €45k in terms of carding. Plus an additional co-funding of €260k."  He went on to point out that the budget of Sport Ireland is limited and made a case for extra funding.

Maybe the narrow time frame increased the intensity of the debate.  Maybe it generated more heat than light.  Maybe.

It is less than two weeks since the National Sports Policy 2018-2027 was published.  It was not a rushed document - based on the length of time it has been promised.  Unfortunately, it is debatable whether the extra time was of benefit to the resulting publication.  A more comprehensive evaluation of that document will follow in future posts.  For the purpose of this post it is worth pointing out one small element.  The document continues the sleight-of-hand by pointing out that participation in sport is associated with better academic results in the Leaving Certificate.  As pointed out in a previous blog post (here), such claims are a matter of semantics (or maybe some antics).  The only sports that are statistically significant in the final statistical model are hockey, hurling, and basketball.

As an economist it is difficult to be too critical of Sport Ireland, John Treacy, or those who will advocate for greater funding of their sport.  Self-interest plays a large role in our motivations and that self-interest is so often defined by our identity.  On Saturday, I listened to the radio and heard the voice of a past student.  As I drove through County Offaly I remembered our visit to Cultec to discuss the carbon fibre hurley.  And, I was as delighted with her performance as that of the Irish hockey team.

By Robbie Butler,

Following on from our successful workshop last week on sports betting, it is rather appropriate that we re-start our blog with the traditional Galway Races exercise that puts the Fama's Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) to the test.

Last year we branched out and followed two leading trainers. A profit of more than 31% was reported for Willie Mullins, but Dermot Weld followers would have incurred a loss. As this is our 6th attempt, and with last years draw, the scorelines stands at 1.5 - 3.5, in favour of the bookies. Not deterred, we go again this evening, and for the next six days. 

The rules are as follows. A hypothetical stake of €2 (to win) will be wagered on on all Weld and Mullins trained runners shorter than 4/1, and €1 each way on all those 4/1 or greater. Guaranteed prices are assumed. The trainers will be evaluated separately. 

Updates during the week will follow.

2018 is not a year to forget quickly. An excellent return is reported. In total, 156 horses were wagered on. Mullins saddled 112 and Weld 44.

​Following both trainers resulted in a profit of €56.32 for a €2 stake per horse. That's a 36.1% return. Things were even better for Mullins alone, with a reported profit of €71.52 for a €2 stake. This is a massive 63.9% return! 

At this time of year we take our regular summer break.

Our annual workshop returns on the 23rd and 24th of July 2018. For more information and registration see here.

We will return on the 30th of July 2018.

By Robbie Butler,

The title of this post is not a mistake. Rather it is driven by an overview (see here for full piece) of player nationality and region of birth at World Cups since 2002. This in-depth work explores the past four World Cups and the current tournament and finds that France has been most successful at producing players to perform at the tournament.

Since Korea and Japan, France has provided 216 players at five world cups. While more than half have represented their country of birth, squad limits of 23 mean that 100+ have represented other nations. This is no doubt a consequence of France's colonial past. Players born in the country have put many international jerseys on, including the likes of Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria and Ivory Coast. 

As we head towards the end of Week 1 at the 2018 World Cup, it is interesting to examine a possible team that the city of Paris could field. The eleven would include the likes of Bernard Mendy, N'golo Kante, Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappe. What is even more remarkable is the fact that the team could include the likes of Anthony Martial, Riyad Mahrez and Kingsely Coman, none of which made it to Russia.

From an Irish perspective, 12 players born on this island, make the overall list. This might appear to be low and places the country second last behind Iceland, Togo, Panama and Trinidad and Tobago. This can be explained by a number of factors.

​Firstly, the Irish team last reached the World Cup finals in 2002 so there is a single observation. Secondly, as the world's first colony, Irish squads are often dominated by players who's parents and grandparent migrated to England, Wales and Scotland. Lastly, migration to Ireland is a relatively new phenomenon. In fact, this did not significantly start until the early 2000s. However, things might be about to change. Most migration to Ireland in this time has come from Eastern Europe and West Africa. Children born in this country, whose parents emigrated to Ireland, could now be as old as 17 or 18. In the not too distance future we may start to see children born in places such as Dublin and Cork represent countries like Poland, Latvia, Nigeria and Ivory Coast. 

And of course, we would also argue that the Irish figures should be higher, and France around 20 lower. We haven't forgotten about Thierry Henry and that handball in Paris in 2009. I don't think we ever will. 

By John Considine

This day last week there was an engaging radio discussion between Matt Cooper and Ewan MacKenna about the funding of gaelic games in Dublin.  The discussion took place on The Last Word (it is available on NewsTalk's Listen Back facility about 2 hours and 7 minutes into the podcast).  It is well worth a listen.  MacKenna provides some details on the funding and later in the discussion highlights some success enjoyed by the county.  The discussion reminded me of an article from a couple of years ago.

The article that came to mind was one proposing a rating system for gaelic football teams.  It appeared in the International Journal of Computer Science in Sport.  The primary purpose of the article was to advocate for a modified version of a system used to rate chess players.  The article also examined factors that influenced the success of teams.  The correlation between the rating values and financial figures threw up one very interesting result.

Dublin was the highest rated team at the end of 2015.  This rating was derived using 1,101 games between 2010 and 2015.  Dublin also received by far the largest amount of Games Development Income per registered player from the sport's governing body (the GAA).  According to the authors, Dublin received more than the other top 10 teams combined (MacKenna makes similar comparisons).  Dublin ranked first in both success and games development income.  These facts sit well with the conventional wisdom that Dublin's success is driven by the funding they received from the GAA.  There is a part of me that has sympathy with this view.

But the statistical results presented by S. Mangan and K. Collins bring this into question.  The correlation between "Games Development Income per registered player" and a team's rating was statistically significant and negative.  Negative.  The more GDI per registered player a team received from the governing body then the less their chances of success.

The authors of the article do not spend much time discussing the correlation.  This is probably a wise decision as there are potentially too many possibilities to be discussed and a limited amount of space to discuss them in.  What does the skewed distribution of funding imply for the correlations?  Are the results specific to the length of the time period and/or the specific time period selected?  Moreover, while many might expect a positive relationship between the two, the most important thing to remember is that "development" is not same as "success".  If nothing else then the article should make us pause for thought.

There is little doubt but that the debate will continue.