VizWiz

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Showing posts with label Chelsea. Show all posts

August 9, 2018

The Petr Cech of Chelsea was outstanding...then he moved to Arsenal

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Arsenal signed goalkeeper Bern Leno in the offseason. Rumors have been swirling about when, not if, he'll takeover as their top choice keeper. Three summers ago, Arsenal signed Petr Cech away from Chelsea, and with that signing, Arsenal had hoped to sure up their defense.

In an Arsenalesque sense of optimism, Arsene Wenger thought bringing in a great goalkeeper would solve their defensive woes. Many fans, however, knew that the real problems were in front of the goalkeeper. Without a solid defense, a goalkeeper cannot be effective.

This led me to thinking about how Cech's first three seasons compared to his first three seasons with Chelsea, when he was widely considered one of the best goalkeepers in the World. The data shows that Arsenal more or less ruined him. Or did Chelsea's stellar defense make him better than he really is?

October 5, 2015

Who's to Blame for Chelsea's Worst Start in 37 Years?

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To say the start to Chelsea’s season has been a debacle would be a massive understatement. From an outsider, it seems fairly clear that Jose Mourinho has lost the dressing room. He even got the kiss of death today when the club released a statement giving him a vote of confidence.

It’s been interesting watch it unfold from this side of the pond. Mourinho is a media darling, even getting away without punishment from the FA and the club for his treatment of team doctor Eva Carneiro. After every loss he pushes the blame on someone other than himself. It’s likely only a matter of one more loss before he gets the sack.

Given all of Mourinho’s shortcomings as a manager this year, the ultimate proof comes in the form of his players’ performances on the pitch. So far this season, those performances have been downright dreadful. Just how bad has it been? The viz below shows that things are really, really bad.

I looked at three key stats from WhoScored.com: Player Rating, Pass Completion %, and Aerial Duals Won. I took the data and filtered it down to the outfield players that made contributions both last season and this. I then created the simple analysis below.

Some notes:

  1. Every player has a lower rating this year than last. Particularly in poor form are Terry, Hazard, Costa and Ivanovic.
  2. Some of Chelsea’s most creative players are struggling to connect passes. Are the likes of Ramires, Oscar and Fabregas trying too hard under the pressure perhaps?
  3. Matic has been taking a lot of stick from Mourinho, but his pass completion % is 3.5% better than last year. He’s not being nearly as sloppy with the ball as his midfield counterparts, though if you read the papers you would think it was the opposite.
  4. John Terry is showing his age when it comes to aerial duals. He’s winning less than half as many as last year.

If things don’t turn around in the next fixture against Aston Villa, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Jose got the sack. Why? Because you can’t fire 24 players at once and because Mourinho’s ego is too big to last more than three years at any club.

April 20, 2015

Makeover Monday: Chelsea Are the Worst-Behaved Team in the Premier League When It Comes to Showing Respect to Referees

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Last week the Premier League published the first (sort of) detailed stats on their Fair Play League table. Quickly thereafter, all of the news outlets reports how Chelsea basically treats the refs like garbage. Anyone that watches the Premier League, even Chelsea fans, knows this is true. Don’t deny it folks!

As I was scouring the various reports, I didn’t see anyone actually create a viz on the subject. The best I found was this table from The Daily Mail:


A table is great for ranking and looking things up, but terrible for doing any sort of analysis. I downloaded the FPL table into Excel (here) and combined it with the BPL standings as of the same date.

In the viz below, I’m using Chelsea as the baseline for comparison, because the story that interested me was how much worse does Chelsea behave compared to the other teams. For example, if you hover over Liverpool, you will see that Chelsea is 14% worse with its respect for referees.

I then added a second tab that allows you to explore the data on your own. Pick a FPL stat, a BPL stat and you can compare and contrast. The question I wanted to answer here was “Is there a relationship between FPL and BPL stats?” I can’t find any interesting relationships, but maybe you can.

March 27, 2011

Creating vs. Finishing – A Follow-up to OnFooty for the Premier League

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On Football has quickly become one of my favorite blogs to follow (Twitter) and one of the most interesting posts of late was an analysis of “finishing” in Major League Soccer.  OnFooty analyzed conversation rate vs. the number of shots for each team over the total season.  Typically conversion rate is calculated as goals/shots on target, but OnFooty has a terrific case for using shots in lieu of shots on target.

In conclusion, Sarah said “The upper right quadrant (teams that are above average at both creating and finishing) contains the MLS Cup Finalists and the number one seeds for each conference.

This quickly led me to the Premier League and interestingly enough, the same analysis holds true through 30 rounds (29 for some teams) this season.  The top four teams are all in the upper-right quadrant. 

If you follow English football, you might note these things as well:

  1. Tottenham needs to improve their finishing if they want to secure a returns spot into the Champions League qualification round (for the 4th place finisher)
  2. Blackpool (one of the most exciting teams to watch) score at a terrific rate, but since they’re in 15th place in the table, they obviously need to work on their defense (their philosophy is to outscore their opponents since they know they can’t stop them
  3. Wigan has the worst conversion rate and sits last in the table…enough said

Play with the view below.  Choose your vertical and horizontal axis, check out the different tabs.  What do you see?

I’m compelled to look historically to see if this theory holds true season after season…maybe one day when I have more time on my hands (I’m busy tallying stats for my daughter’s soccer team).

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