Blog Posts

  • On Blocks

    Here at Differentgame we’ve been intrigued by the humble block since we read this by @marktaylor0. The discussion and debate continues about how much credit to give defenders for a block or how much we should debit attackers for being daft enough to try and shoot through gaps they really shouldn’t have. @benjaminpugsley and @danny_pugsley…

  • Luis Suarez – Why Liverpool Haven’t Got Enough

    Liverpool fans sing a song expressing the feeling that they just can’t seem to get enough Suarez. There’s a growing consensus in the football analytics community that you know, you actually can. In fact in some areas, you can probably get too much. Forget the Uruguayan’s antics and let’s just concentrate on the football. We’re…

  • What Areas do Assists Come From?

    Well, we’ve done an awful lot of shots here at Differentgame so we thought we’d have a look at the final touches that lead up to them instead. The graphic below shows 100+ assists from the weekend games in the last weeks of the season. The graphic shows the full attacking half of the field.…

  • A Study Of the First 1000 Shots in the EPL This Year

    The first time we properly scrutinsed Differentgame’s expected goals model we had 3000 shots in the data bank. We were a little bit scared to make conclusions on what might have been considered a small sample size – a full Premier League season comes in at around 10000 shots. By the time those had been…

  • What is SPAM good for?

    We’re going off the beaten track this week at Differentgame, and doing exactly what we’ve said football number bloggers should step away from. We’ve made this blog look like an economics paper in order to test SPAM’s relationship with reality. We had to learn new skills to come up with this post and are striding…