| 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)! |
> 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).