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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Categories
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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