Blog Posts

  • Striking Questions – Part One

    Who’s the best finisher in the league? Just how bad is Carlton Cole? How spectacular has Fernando Torres’ fall from grace been? All will be revealed fact fans, but first we’ve got some explaining to do for new visitors. The graphic below is the basis of our original ‘shot model’. Year on year it takes…

  • It’s a Funnely Old Game – Replotting Keeper Save %s

    Ok, so we all make mistakes. Thanks to a couple of questions from readers (one in the comments section, one from @11tegen11) we spotted some flaws in our previous graphics. In trying to answer the questions we noticed that the curved lines in our previous plots were set at 3 standard deviations from the mean…

  • Who is the Premier League’s Best Shot-Stopper?

    Last time out we looked at what we think our goalkeeping model actually measures and the ability of keepers to continually make saves from Zones 1 and 2. We found that the range in ability in Zone 1 was pretty narrow, but as we got further out centrally into Zone 2, the apparent ‘talent gap’…

  • Hawkes Bizarre – What can Szczesny’s decision making tell us about luck?

    If you said to the average football fan that there’s no skill involved in around a quarter of the saves professional goalkeepers make they’d say you were bonkers. No doubt anyone of you or us would be hopeless if we were stuck between the sticks in a Premier League game. There’d be guaranteed laughs (almost…

  • The Keepers’ Comfort Zone

    The gathering of goalkeeping data continues here at Differentgame. There’s well over two seasons and 7000 saves in the databank, and as we saw with our location work on shots and chance creation, there is little difference from season to season in the numbers so far on shot-stopping. League averages are holding pretty steady. Our…