- Path:
-
Miss it like Messi: Extracting value from off-target shots in soccer
Files
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Periodical
- Title:
- Journal of quantitative analysis in sports
- Publication:
-
Berlin Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2005 -
- Scope:
- Online-Ressource
- Note:
- Gesehen am 06.02.12
- C!URL-Ä(06-02-12)
- ISSN:
- 1559-0410
- ZDB-ID:
- 2233187-6
- Keywords:
- Zeitschrift
- Classification:
- Sport
- Copyright:
- Rights reserved
- Accessibility:
- Eingeschränkter Zugang mit Nutzungsbeschränkungen
- Collection:
- Sport
Article
- Title:
- Miss it like Messi: Extracting value from off-target shots in soccer
- Publication:
-
Berlin Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2024
- Language:
- English
- Scope:
- Online-Ressource
- Note:
- Kein Open Access
- Archivierung/Langzeitarchivierung gewährleistet
- Keywords:
- generative model ; mixture model ; shot trajectories ; player valuation ; Bayesian hierarchical model ; spatial data
- Copyright:
- Rights reserved
- Accessibility:
- Eingeschränkter Zugang mit Nutzungsbeschränkungen
- Information:
-
Abstract: Measuring soccer shooting skill is a challenging analytics problem due to the scarcity and highly contextual nature of scoring events. The introduction of more advanced data surrounding soccer shots has given rise to model-based metrics which better cope with these challenges. Specifically, metrics such as expected goals added, goals above expectation, and post-shot expected goals all use advanced data to offer an improvement over the classical conversion rate. However, all metrics developed to date assign a value of zero to off-target shots, which account for almost two-thirds of all shots, since these shots have no probability of scoring. We posit that there is non-negligible shooting skill signal contained in the trajectories of off-target shots and propose two shooting skill metrics that incorporate the signal contained in off-target shots. Specifically, we develop a player-specific generative model for shot trajectories based on a mixture of truncated bivariate Gaussian distributions. We use this generative model to compute metrics that allow us to attach non-zero value to off-target shots. We demonstrate that our proposed metrics are more stable than current state-of-the-art metrics and have increased predictive power.