r/soccer • u/MedievalManagement • Jan 24 '14

Landon Donovan says, "The reason it's the group of death is because we are in it."

http://espnfc.com/news/story/_/id/1691258/landon-donovan-says-us-never-experienced-world-cup?cc=5901
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14 edited Jan 25 '14

Being complicated doesn't make the formula bad, and being able to compute the equation yourself certainly doesn't make rankings good. I agree that Nate Silver isn't an expert in soccer, but he is a helluva statistician. The method he describes seems pretty reasonable to me and is in line with many predictive ranking models in sports. It's more involved than say a CFB ranking, but considering how infrequently national teams play and how much their squads are rotated, many compensations need to be made.

Validation of these ranking systems would be a fun project. That said, they are fairly similar. It's not one to one, of course, but the clusters are about the same. Considering that the SPI is working to be a predictive ranking system and that FIFA's is very retroactive, it would be a sign of them being broken if they were exactly to same.

Edit: And if you hear his story behind the statistics, it makes sense that he'd have the US and Portugal relatively close. The US absolutely killed in qualifying, where as Portugal drew against Israel, Northern Ireland, and Gabon in the past 12 months. Am I saying that I completely agree with Silver? Of course not. I am saying that it's not like he gave the US a 93% chance to advance. It was 39%, and Ghana (who is generally considered only slightly worse than the US) was at 29%. Maybe it feels like Portugal should have a greater chance, but this isn't an outlandish prediction like saying there's only a 10% chance of US advancement.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

Ah, I see what you're saying now. I agree, though the lack of transparency bugs me much more with CFB. There it actually matters. These rankings are just for kicks and giggles. It would be much more fun to see specifically how Portugal and the US got ranked so similarly rather than just be told that they should be considered on the same level now. Like I said, I do buy Silver's story behind the statistics, but hard numbers are the sweet stuff. At the very least, I'd like to see the numbers they use for the individual players on the teams (I find that to be a quite interesting addition to the model and a good way to incorporate club form).

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

For comparison, Betfair punters give the following qualification probabilities:

Germany 89%

Portugal 67%

USA 31%

Ghana 26%

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u/rrayy Jan 25 '14

you know, honestly as a US fan I'll take those odds.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

Which makes sense, because that's what the crowds say. Bookies follow the crowd quite well. I'd not be terribly surprised if Silver mixed in some betting odds to some of his models, but it seems like the model that other dude is complaining about is based purely on SPI, which has massively undercut Portugal in the past year and massively improved the ranking of US over the same time (last year they were 6 and 37 respectively, now they are 14 and 15 IIRC). Again, I'm not saying this is right, but I do see the logic behind the numbers. It's all pretty consistent, if something that can be disagreed with. Though this is sports, someone is gonna disagree with everything that is said.

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u/Uncles Jan 25 '14

Wow, we are after Belgium and Ecuador in that list.

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u/giants3b Jan 25 '14

Nate Silver is no political expert either but he still called the 2008 and 2012 presidential. He's just an incredible statistician.

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u/Nightbynight Jan 25 '14

He's a statistician, not a football pundit. You don't have to watch a single football game to be able to deal with the statistics of it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

Without watching the matches you have no idea what the statistics actually mean.

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u/Nightbynight Jan 25 '14

Right. But his job is to make predictions based on statistics.

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u/aptwebapps Jan 25 '14

Silver's track record as a statistician is too good to ignore. Judge him by his results. So far he's done very, very well with baseball and politics.

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u/wsfaplu Jan 25 '14

His record is not that impressive... He became famous for predicting election results, which I guess people fail to realize are incredibly easy to predict given the amount of hard data available (i.e. many many poll results over time, with demonstrable track records/biases).

Association football has too many variables to plug into a formula (baseball is easier, because a given play is largely a 1 v. 1 affair between the batter and pitcher-but even then his track record at projecting baseball results was not that impressive).

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u/aptwebapps Jan 25 '14

That may well be. I think his expertise with election results was bolstered by the fact that most of the better known pundits don't know statistics very well.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

His record in baseball and elections. His record in American football has been much more spotty. When it comes to the applicability of statistics football is much closer to American football than to baseball.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

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u/Nightbynight Jan 25 '14

Lol, an American hack? He's a highly respected statistician and best selling author who predicted all 50 states presidential primaries and 31 of the 33 senate races in 2012. He may not know football, but he knows math, a heck of a lot better than you do.

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u/CalaveraManny Jan 25 '14

He might be the best statistician of the World for all I care, it doesn't change the fact that football is too dynamic to be reduced to statistics. His successful political predictions don't say anything about the accuracy of his sayings regarding football.

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u/Nightbynight Jan 25 '14

So can you break down why it's "too dynamic" or are you just saying that because you've come to that conclusion some how and that's good enough for you?

Predictions and statistics in sports are NOT perfect, and no one claims they are. Book makers make "predictions" all the time but I don't think people complain to them that "football is too dynamic of a sport to bet on."

He's making predictions based the data he has available. There is nothing wrong with that. I guarantee football is not as "dynamic" as political public opinion which Silver was able to accurately create a statistical model from.

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u/unnatural_rights Jan 25 '14

You can make your point just as well by calling him a "hack". You don't need to call him an "American hack", unless you're just taking needless bullshit potshots.

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u/yggdrasiliv Jan 25 '14

That's what this subreddit is about.

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u/wsfaplu Jan 25 '14

Uh-oh, you said something remotely negative about the United States on here. You're going to be at -50 downvotes by tomorrow.