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The State of Analytics: Newcastle, Krul, and the difficulty in understanding regression in football | Counter Attack | Blogs | theScore.com
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The State of Analytics: Newcastle, Krul, and the difficulty in understanding regression in football
Posted by Richard Whittall under Soccer Analytics on Nov 12, 2013

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The State of Analytics: Newcastle, Krul, and the difficulty in understanding regression in football | Counter Attack | Blogs | theScore.com

Richard Whittall
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If you were a lazy gambler, you could do well just to make a series of bets on Premier League teams with a low PDO and a high shots ratio. Why is that? Well, Total Shots Ratio is a good predictive metric for points totals and stabilizes over 4-6 games (I feel like Ive written this sentence about a thousand times now). Teams with a high TSR tend to finish higher up the table over the course of a season. Ta da! PDO on the other hand is just a teams shot percentage and save percentage, which we know regresses quickly to the mean. What does that mean? It means that an ability to score or save more or less goals on the same number of shots (for and against) is a function of random variation or luck. We can actually quantify it (Grayson did two years ago). I dont want to repost those graphs because you should be visiting that site more often anyway, but they illustrate how high or low save and shot percentages regress to the mean over a reasonably small number of
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The State of Analytics: Newcastle, Krul, and the difficulty in understanding regression in football | Counter Attack | Blogs | theScore.com

games. And so a team with a low PDO but a high TSR will appear to be struggling in the near-term, but will arguably improve over the long term as their shot and save percentage regresses to the mean. So place your bets (although this is silly since most houses that set lines are already onto this and are therefore way ahead of you, smart guy)! Statistically and mathematically, this concept makes vivid sense. The problem, as ever, is translating this abstract idea onto the lived, messy game of football. Take Newcastles recent form. Two game days ago, Alan Pardews side had the 6th highest Total Shots Ratio in the Premier League with .566. Their PDO however was almost in the basement, the third lowest in the Premier League at 883 (the mean PDO is 1000). The culprit here appears to be their save percentage: 60.98%. At that point in the season, Newcastle had a 3-2-4 record, and had posted the fifth highest goals-against record in the EPL with 16 shots let in. Flash forward two match days. Newcastles TSR had dropped a little to .522. Their PDO however had jumped ten points to 987, within normal distance of the mean. Crucially, their save percentage had jumped from 61% to 71.93%. This shift had come on the back of two wins: a 2-0 result against Chelsea and a 0-1 win against Spurs (despite getting rampantly out shot which helped drop their TSR). The latter match in particular resulted in heaps of praise for Newcastle keeper Tim Krul. His manager Alan Pardew called him one of the best keepers in the league, while Spurs keeper Brad Friedel called him outstanding. And in truth, Krul played out of his skin, stopping 14 (!) shots and further killing Tottenhams woeful shot percentage. So what is this? Regression? Or a bump in the numbers courtesy of a sudden improvement in form from keeper Tim Krul that will likely continue over the course of the season due to natural regression? Of course when that regression does occur, the narrative spinners could point to Kruls stand up performance against Spurs as some sort of turning point. Two games of course cant be used as evidence of much of anything. But Newcastles case at least illustrates how regression is counterintuitive when applied to a skill-based sport like football. If Newcastles form improves, we naturally want to believe there is a deliberate cause. Kruls improvement, Pardew working on defence, whatever. And yet we know that Newcastle had a pretty good defence and attack before they faced Chelsea and Tottenham based on their shots ratio. Even Kruls incredible performance against Spurs didnt necessarily mark a sudden, important improvement in form. While Kruls volume of shots faced was greater than most keepers, the save percentage itself was the same for any keeper who posts a clean sheet: 100%. Yes, these saves were acrobatic, incredible, difficult. But
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The State of Analytics: Newcastle, Krul, and the difficulty in understanding regression in football | Counter Attack | Blogs | theScore.com

in essence they looked all the more impressive because there were more of them than in an average PL match. That Krul managed to do so isnt just a function of his innate talent, but also Spurs shooting locations and random variation. If Krul lets in two goals on 5 shots in his next match, it doesnt preclude that the save percentage wont tick up again in the few matches after that. Thats random variation (if you want to get a sense of streak bias, read this old post on the Irreverent Oiler Fans blog). Of course it needs to be stated that PDO isnt entirely a reflection of random variation. Heres Grayson:

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So, the increased sample size suggests that, at the team level in the Premiership, the variation from the mean of a teams sh% is 43% due to talent and 57% due to luck, its sv% is 38% due to talent and 62% luck, and its PDO is 44% due to talent and 56% due to luck. All of these are slight revisions upwards from the previous data, but also still make any of these metrics a pretty poor indicator as to a teams true talent.

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That Krul is a great keeper or Newcastle has reasonably competent defenders obviously features in these numbers. The point is however that a good save percentage is a chimera as far as how a team is going to do in March if its performing well in November. Newcastle arent the only side to benefit/worsen from PDO regression. As Ben Pugsley from this weeks Alternative PL tables notes, Southamptons PDO has fallen almost 7 percentage points in the last 2 weeks. Man Uniteds has risen dramatically. Pugsley also notes Spurs incredibly low shot percentage, and here again we walk into an issue that may have more to do with skill (Spurs love affair with long-range, speculative shots for example) than luck when it comes to PDO.
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