[dmichulke]

I watched quite a few matches and among the things I saw in the matches but not in any statistics are:

- motivation (Germany and Croatia were the two extremes here, no idea how to measure it)

- team cohesion (number of articles in a few journals questioning the team cohesion, maybe also articles about individual players)

- creativity in offense (maybe measurable via "target missed from close distance" + "ball passed front of the goal")

- number of errors in defense that didn't lead to a goal

- percentage of times ball possession was lost from own goal to enemy's area (England was really bad here against Croatia)

[lagadu]

> - creativity in offense (maybe measurable via "target missed from close distance" + "ball passed front of the goal")

This one would benefit possession-based teams, so it would fail to give decent odds to the current world and european champions (France and Portugal respectively) which don't play possession. Of course it's possible they're outliers but we'll never know.

[smcl]

These kinda show what makes predicting football particularly difficult. I like the ideas, and I think we (or more likely some ML algorithm) can come up with the set of conditions that showed why France prevailed against the specific opposition at this specific World Cup ... but I suspect that the conditions would be pretty unique and invalid for Euro 2020, WC 2022 etc.

As you identified, motivation could be pretty hard to measure ... but even if we could it might be a pretty poor predictor anyway. France in the early stages didn't look very motivated, while England and Colombia looked pretty lively.

Team cohesion - the German team were pretty consistent (not dazzling, but consistent) and we know how that ended. Again France didn't really impress until the latter stages of the WC.

Creativity in offense - I guess it can indicate a sort of calm or confidence in front of goal but actually it can actually be seen as pretty negative. For example Arsenal a few years back came under fire for having plenty of possession in the 18 yard box but failing to convert. Spain's confident quick pass-and-move "tiki-taka" was ever-present and has in my eyes been impotent in the last few years (and more important as a neutral viewer - very frustrating to watch).

Defensive errors that didn't lead to a goal could be a nice indicator of the ability of a defence to pick up after each others mistakes - but at the same time these errors that lead to goals (i.e. Croatia's second goal in the final) are relatively rare and a lack of a goal could just point to the opposing team's inability to convert due to a poorly organised or a lack of opportunism from their strikers.

I'm not sure what you mean with the last one, but I think this could be a nice one - if you mean "times you lost possession in your own half". A profligate midfield and defence is bound to ship goals, I doubt there are many teams that can either fight back after trailing by a goal or two or score enough to maintain a reasonable buffer.

I applaud the effort though - it takes more creativity and care to think of some new angles (like you did) than to think of some possible counter examples (like I did)!

[dmichulke]

Thank you for the warm words, I guess the reason is my occupation plus the fact that I just spend my last few weeks watching many games with family and friends.

> I'm not sure what you mean with the last one, but I think this could be a nice one - if you mean "times you lost possession in your own half"

Almost, England lost the ball frequently (> 50+x% with a large x AFAI could see) due to the keeper sending out long balls. I'd like to measure that somehow. Could be done via number of seconds in possession after a goal kick, an indicator whether a hypothetical 85% marker of the field was reached or measuring whether the ball was at least 5x successfully passed (or resulted in a goal).

[smcl]

Ahhhh I see. Actually this is something I've really been curious about myself - whether the better strategy overall for a keeper returning the ball into open play (from goal kick or from hand) is to just boot it as far up-field as possible or passing it short to one of the defence or midfielders sitting deep.

Interestingly something like this is a tactic used in Rugby (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbti6mLvSJs). I used to play a lot of football when I was younger and at our level (waaaay down the scottish league pyramid) against tired, hungover or generally weak opposition, keeping them under pressure by dominating the territorial game but sacrificing possession was criminally underrated. Usually if you could keep hammering them for 60 minutes and had the legs to step up a gear in the last 30 or so you could grab a valuable goal or two :-)