Categories
culture sport

The Soul of a Stadium is in its Name and the English are Preserving it

The sports stadium is a part of the fabric of a city. Any municipality worth its salt has a sporting complex but a stadium or an arena that supports top-flight athletics is something that many urban centers pursue for prestige. One of the marks of a megacity is the number of stadiums and arenas: one is not enough and the more there are the greater the prestige and the more diverse the sporting interests. The very size of modern stadiums speaks to the popularity and centrality – and, of course, the economic possibilities – of sport.

The modern sports stadium has evolved from Hellenic and Hellenistic models. Sports stadiums were often large in antiquity, demonstrating that the popularity of sport and its ability to bring people together in one place is not a modern phenomenon. Like seemingly much else, this central sporting landmark did not exist in feudal Western Europe. One could certainly argue that the dourness and backwardness of medieval Europe are connected to the lack of proper sporting complexes.

The tradition of the large stadium may have bypassed some eras but there is a traceable lineage back to those ancient archetypes. I recently visited Afrodisias and marveled at the size of the stadion. The grandeur continued into the Roman age, best exemplified by the Colosseum in Rome and later the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The modern stadium, which arose in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, built off the antique example.

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Categories
data sport

Premier League Head-to-Head Records

I recently came across an article that explored the idea of the “nemesis” in football, i.e. that team against which a club performs the worst. It’s a concept that crosses the minds of many fans – in the context of existential angst when you lose yet another game to your closest rival; in the context of hubristic triumph, when you consider a game won before it’s played because of past history;  and in the context of casual fandom when television producers flash up some obscure statistic of past head-to-head encounters.

At the same time I found that article, I was building a new head-to-head exploration feature for my football site (it’s under the Tables section). The functionality displays a matrix showing head-to-head results using points, goals, and results metrics. I’d already built a rivalries page with historical data on the biggest derbies and the ability to explore past results for any match-up (also under the Tables section). So the idea of head-to-head match-ups was something I’d looked at casually before and the article helped me to think about other angles to explore in the data.

For this article here, I’ll show each Premier League side’s favorite opponent and most truculent adversary using average points per game as it’s what I’ve personally used to think about performance on a per-game basis. I’ve limited the analysis to match-ups where teams have played each other at least ten times, or at least five season of Premier League football together. That’s useful as it removes the perfect records that top teams have against minnows who have barely thrived in the top flight and allows for more interesting results. The tool on my site does not have any such limit so fans of Bournemouth, for example, can mosey on over there for more details.

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Categories
data sport

Ranking the most exciting and dramatic Premier League seasons using data

Football seasons can live long in the memory for many reasons. Club supporters will rely on their own team’s successes or failures to measure each season. The broader football-watching and the sport’s historians will craft narratives that can be revisited time and again, narratives that true or not become the measure of a how a season is remembered as time softens the true memories of a football season long ago.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been collecting and collating a wide variety of football data. And I began to wonder: so much of data analysis in sports looks at individual and team performance but can we also measure seasons? Can we use data, instead of rose-tinged memories and Wikipedia entries, to objectively identify which seasons were the most exciting, which ones were the most dramatic?

Of course, first we need to try to measure excitement. I decided to look at three general dimensions: the title race, the relegation battle, and everything else. The following sections spend a decent amount of time exploring different metrics which, perhaps, lend themselves to measuring the inherent drama of a season. Unless otherwise noted, each metric covers the second half of the season instead of the full season. I’ve made a simple assumption that seasons are more dramatic and memorable in  more for what happens in the second half instead of through their full course.

It’s worth noting that, for the author, the purpose of writing this article was as much the exploration of the metrics and using them to uncover interesting trends from the past as it was with developing an actual ranking. I am by no means a mathematician nor a statistician, and there will perhaps a couple of areas where a data scientist may shake their head in bewilderment at certain methodologies. I certainly enjoyed diving into the metrics and learning more about Premier League history, especially the earlier years, and it is my fervent hope that some casual fan stumbles upon this article and finds some entertainment in it.

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Categories
data sport

The Home Field Advantage in Soccer

After COVID-19 disrupted football, no more than it disrupted all of society and civilization across the world, and enforced a pause of several months, the games have recently restarted with the German Bundesliga the first of the major leagues to resume play. Games are played without fans, leading to a stark leveling of the home cooking used by teams to gain an advantage on their own territory. Playing at home confers a distinct advantage – everyone knows that. But the restart of football got me thinking about how much of an advantage is there really.

I draw upon a few data sets. I have match results for the Turkish Super Lig back the 1959/60 season, the German Bundesliga from the 1963/64 season, the full set of Premier League fixtures starting in 1992/93, and Spanish La Liga and Champions League results dating back to 2010/11. I have omitted details on the La Liga and UCL because the data set is small – and some fields have odd values that make me doubt the data integrity – but I have included them in the full file linked at the end. I also have events data (goals, bookings, penalties, etc.) for those seasons. Some of the earlier seasons of the Turkish and German leagues have missing data for certain event types so some seasons are omitted in the analyses.

First, I looked at the points advantage that home teams gain. After all, the long-term goal of every club is to accumulate points over the course of a season. I use a simple metric: net points gained per home game, calculated with simple arithmetic by subtracting the average points per game for away teams from the average points per game for home teams. At a very high level, across all of the data sets I looked at, recent trends show that home field confers an advantage of between 0.4 and 0.6 points per game. What is evident – more so in the German and Turkish data sets because of the larger data set – is that the home advantage has decreased over time. But it still exists and is significant.

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Categories
books culture history

The Periodic History Reader, Volume 1

A selection of histories read in the period covering January to April of 2020.

In God’s Path by Robert G. Hoyland [Oxford University Press, 2015]

The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

The rapid expansion of Islam is one of history’s most fascinating events and the exploration of its causes is just as fascinating. How could a group of nomadic tribes pour out of the desert and remake the map of late antiquity by conquering lands from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush in a century? Hoyland’s book is an erudite account that attempts to answer that question, beginning by explaining the context of pre-Islamic Arabia and proceeding through to the fall of the Ummayad caliphate. It’s an excellent work – highly readable while expertly synthesizing the complexity of the period. The assumed premise of the question I pose above, that the Arabs came out of nowhere, is punctured by one of the many interesting insights the book provides. The Arab conquerors did not come out of nowhere – they had been fighting with and against the Byzantines and Sasanians for decades. The conquering armies weren’t filled with the fire of holy war but the pursuit of booty. They used the time-honored tradition of leaving the locals in charge after the fighting was done (as long as tributes were paid). And the conquering wasn’t as easy as posterity makes it seems, while Islam itself didn’t gain a widespread foothold for a long time (partly as a deliberate policy of Muslims, who realized that the more people converted the less revenue they made off of taxing non-Muslim populations). By no means is this a popular history: but it is highly readable while maintaining a high degree of scholarship. Highly recommended for those interested in the era. [4/5]

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books culture fiction

The Periodic Fiction Reader, Vol 1

A selection of fictional works read in the period from January-ish through April 2020.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons [4/5, for now]

Hyperion, winner of the Hugo award in 1990, is considered one of modern science fiction’s classics. I recently made my way through the same paperback I first read over twenty years ago to see how it held up (as an aside, my favorite reading medium is surely the mass-market paperback, perhaps a nostalgic reaction to the most common format in my childhood and one that is no longer as prevalent as it should be). This is a complex novel, as much a literary fiction exercise as a popular science fiction, with several plot threads deftly managed across intertwined stories with a common element: the planet Hyperion, home to a mysterious being called the Shrike, which seems to be a vengeful and murderous deity, and the equally mysterious Time Tombs, where time flows backward. The structure of the book is based on the Canterbury Tales: six travelers tell their tales while on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs. The novel is ambitious and Simmons creates a universe of complex personalities, politics, and science. His prose struck me as somewhat muscular, reflective of the time when it was written, but there was nothing that felt dated about the overall experience and his talent as a writer is obvious. I’m unsure of my final feelings: it should be admired for its accomplishment but whether or not I enjoyed the experience of reading it is still out for verdict. I probably won’t have a final conclusion for some months yet and perhaps that in and of itself validates the reading. It’s a must for serious science fiction readers.

The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman [5/5 and 4/5]

I’d read the full His Dark Materials trilogy not too long ago but my interest in revisiting it was rekindled after recently reading Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage and watching HBO’s serialization of the first novel. Having enough familiarity with its plot and characters, I skipped that first novel – The Golden Compass – and started my re-read with The Subtle Knife. It’s a wonderful book that seamlessly expands the story’s scope to our and other worlds while retaining focus on the journeys and growth of the main characters, Lyra and Will. The third book loses some of that focus as it takes on a full-scale universal conflict, spends more time with other characters, and develops related tangents (such as an imaginative diversion into xenobiology) though ultimately all the threads satisfyingly come back together with Lyra and Will at their center. It’s tempting to classify the trilogy as young adult fiction, given that the protagonists are adolescents, but that is to deny it due justice as a member of fantasy fiction’s pantheon and its wide appeal to readers of all ages. Pullman’s prose is excellent, the action and flow inexorable, and the characters memorable.

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Welcome to DorukAkan football

As of December 18, 2019, the dorukakan.com football site, available at dorukakan.com/football/football.php, is live.

Over the past several years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating a website. I’ve dabbled at creating personal portals, sketching out numerous designs on paper, and built a few simple utilities for activities like tracking book collections and rating whisky. It was never really my ambition to create a finished product. Instead, the process alone was sufficient: a pleasant diversion to maintain basic programming skills and explore a particular topic of interest.

Over those years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating this website. This particular website was first conceived when I pondered what a table of the Istanbul clubs would look like when only including the matches among the three. And so began many years of searching for data, then scraping and parsing, parsing and scraping, with no real end in sight. But, eventually, toward the beginning of the 2018/19 season, I was able to build enough momentum to move from basic prototyping to the goal of a production-ready site. In many ways, I got lucky with finding the data in the particular format I found it in – and that fortuity was just the necessary impetus the complete this initiative.

What then is this website? It is a collection of various statistics and information, metrics that are out of the ordinary, an exploration into the interesting trends of football data. It is, hopefully, a beginning as I plan on exploring more avenues in the data. What other ways can we evaluate goal-scorers? Is there anything predictive about these metrics or do they operate only as gems of curiosity (nothing wrong with that)? The original purpose and, now that the site is live, the enduring one is all about pondering a question and then diving into the data to see if answers are within.

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Categories
food

Yogurt

Yogurt is a constant presence in my existence. It is not though the type of presence that is always at the forefront; or the type of subtle but critical presence where you only notice when it is missing. No, I could easily endure weeks without yogurt if necessary. But it is not necessary: yogurt simply is always there.

A lazy way of putting things would be to say yogurt is in my blood. It is perhaps a reflection of my Turkishness, as if the culinary proclivities of generations of Turks before me echo in my blood (and my dietary tract), like the similarly constant presence of tea in my daily diet, or the feeling of world realigning to its proper order when aubergines are in season. Indeed the English word yogurt comes from the Turkish, not as a borrowed word or pass-through but from the old Turkish of the Central Asian steppes. Some Taiwanese claim that they invented shaved ice; I would not be quite so bold as to make such a claim of Turks and yogurt.

I eat plain yogurt. As a child I would eat flavored yogurts but as my palate and mind matured I found the perfection in the austere simplicity of plain yogurt. The allure of plain yogurt is perplexing at times as I would not say yogurt tastes good nor have I ever craved yogurt. Sometimes I think of clear, cold, wind-swept mornings on the open plains when I eat yogurt. There is a raw and realness to yogurt even in its mass-produced form. It invites and welcomes the most natural part of you, that part with the strongest connection to the earth.

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Categories
politics

To American Diversity

There is much in the actions of the Trump presidency that makes me uncomfortable and queasy; that stirs anger and provokes dismay; that erodes my pride and joy in being an American. But nothing has affected me as much as the recent executive orders for the “Muslim ban” and “The Wall.” These decisions of course are no surprise after months of bilious rhetoric from the Trump camp but nevertheless serve as a severe gut punch to anyone like myself that still held hope that core American ideals would overcome knee-jerk isolationism.

What has particularly concerned me throughout is not related to potential policy or legislation changes (though I am concerned about those as well) but how the ethos and the spirit of this country is being transformed. Hatred and marginalization of “others” is becoming normalized and mainstream – and these concepts have no place in this nation. Ours is a country with a flawed and checkered past but we have moved inexorably (albeit slowly but nevertheless inexorably) toward a tolerant and progressive society. Those that have held that progress back are now in positions of power to do more harm than ever before in my lifetime.

There is a personal aspect to this. I myself am not Muslim and I have a general disregard for all religion. My family, however, is Muslim; my background and my forebears come from a culture that identifies as much with Islam as it does anything else. While this does have some bearing on my reaction, my fear and concern does not spring from any perceived threat on my own identity or those of my family and friends as Muslims. This is about my faith in the American system itself. This is about my faith in the American people. How can a country built on the fruits of inclusion and integration support those who so clearly reject those ideals?

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Categories
culture

Best things I watched in 2016

This is a list of the best things I watched in 2016 on a screen be it a film or a television show. Obviously best is a subjective term in this case but I figure my taste exceeds that of most people so I have no qualms with saying that best is actually an objective term in this case. I suppose I should note my predilections when it comes to TV and film: my primary criterion for quality is entertainment. I like action and adventure and fun and I often find “serious” and “deep” themes in visual arts to be tiring and dull.

My enjoyment of the most recent Star Wars film, Rogue One, was challenged by a friend who asked what I learned from the film. I learned nothing but I was mightily entertained (enough to see it again). That’s what matters to me and I will argue until the end of our time on this world that entertainment is the most important aspect of art.

Of course there are exceptions and you will find them below. There are some films that challenge my perception of the world around me and force a paradigm shift in my personal philosophy and outlook. These are just as entertaining to me as are the dumb adventures that are my usual fare and so the objective becomes the subjective again as different people are entertained differently.

Note: this list covers what I actually watched in 2016 regardless of when the film or show was actually made or released.

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