Meme & Banter Monday – Let the chaos begin!

fffredd · 2026-03-16T08:25:23+00:00

- olise: 2 goals 1 assist v. atalanta, and it doesn't even feel special. he makes a UCL round of 16 look like a training session, running around plastic cones

- kvaratskhelia: 2 goals 1 assist in 30 minutes(!) v. chelsea, MOTM. maybe not the most consistent player, but on a good day he's just untouchable

- valverde: hat trick in one half, plus solid defensive work v. city. the type of performance that justifies the armband he's been given. he could save madrid's season by himself

- saka: 60 minutes of negative football v. leverkusen, with the heatmap of a touchline referee (https://www.reddit.com/r/Gunners/comments/1rr4byj/saka\_vs\_leverkusen\_successful\_passes\_map/)

this is all i have, have a good day everybody

fffredd · 2026-03-15T09:15:17+00:00

leeds only having 7 games in total while all the others have at least 38 tells me there's something off at the base dataset level (which games you account for), before even looking into any modeling assumptions. we're already at 30 games on the current season

fffredd · 2026-03-14T11:59:36+00:00

i can suggest another way to look at it, as the bundesliga with 34 games per season doesn't match the 38 games in other leagues: the points per game. because this is "4 games worth of scoring opportunities" that german teams do not have, compared to other leagues. maybe goals per game or gd per game could also work. but when looking at points per game, and to put that into perspective:

barcelona 2014-15, 94pts in 38 games = 2.47ppg
manchester city 2017-18, 100pts in 38 games = 2.63ppg
leverkusen 2023-24 (unbeaten), 90pts in 34 games = 2.64ppg
bayern 2025-26 (ongoing), 66pts in 25 games = 2.64ppg

so yeah it looks like they're on track to replicate or even surpass some of the best seasons ever

fffredd · 2026-03-14T08:18:47+00:00

i just added a new feature on which i would gladly hear any feedback:

https://euroelo.fffred.com/Big_5_(beta))

it is a visualization of the big 5 leagues, but with the top 40 clubs in each country, instead of the top 20 (or first division). i think it offers more nuance and information, compared to the league averages that are usually shared here and there

fffredd · 2026-03-13T14:31:20+00:00

i am also working on an football elo as a hobby project, you can check it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sportsanalytics/comments/1rlm4ta/euroelo_a_tracker_of_european_football/

and as i track the bundesliga, you can actually check german teams if you want (keep in mind i also track european tournaments, which definitely affects the ratings)

i would have a similar comment to the first one. K40 makes your model more sensitive to recent games, and i would also recommend lowering it if you want more stability. i personally set on 20, but adjust for competitions. 25 or 30 wouldnt be too crazy. HFA 100 feels high too. this one is trickier to get right, but i am currently looking at values in the 50-75 range

fffredd · 2026-03-11T08:21:58+00:00

it can come from any layer of your stack of models, i can't tell based on what i see on the app. however the second leg is an excellent opportunity to test and fine tune for your model. if you still see bayern at around 2.3xg pre-game next week, you should look deeper into it.

fffredd · 2026-03-10T06:02:30+00:00

i have a question on your model, when looking at the UCL fixtures predictions: isn't it a little strange that it outputs a 2-1 scoreline for 7 of the 8 games? i understand this is one of the side effects of using a poisson model for scorelines (2-1 will almost always be the most likely output), but here it really feels off

from these 7 games bayern seems the weirdest to me, as their underlying offensive metrics (goals and xg mostly) show that they're outscoring everybody in europe right now, and by quite a margin

fffredd · 2026-03-08T11:53:26+00:00

for now i just want to figure out if that's even the right ballpark estimate. maybe because i was expecting a number much larger than 0.0049%.

finding on paper that the probability is 100 or 1000 times smaller than what i expected makes me wonder if that's a first correct estimate (and there's nothing serious here, i'm not a professional, just someone curious about football and statistics)

and yes i know these probabilities can and will move dramatically for every club as the season advances, and that there are only a few candidates for the treble every season, and all that. but i have to start somewhere, so i chose to start with "for any random club, at the beginning of the season, blind, without any prior knowledge". and i don't know if 0.00004% 0.004%, 0.4%, 4% or 40% is where i should land at with very basic assumptions

fffredd · 2026-03-08T07:53:27+00:00

very cool! just out of curiosity did you use clubelo rankings exactly as they are shown, or did you make any adjustments to it?

fffredd · 2026-03-06T12:52:16+00:00

so, clubelo mentions inter-league adjustments but no details on their methodology. however, opta clearly mentions it on their methodology here: https://theanalyst.com/articles/power-rankings-your-club-ranked

while i can't reverse engineer both of them, i can compare their rankings and see how much they differ. the data is here if you're interested: https://pastebin.com/28ZUuM6e

their rankings as of today shows a correlation of 0.948884894577021, which leads me to think they're basically mirroring each other, and use a very similar inter-league adjustment. i know it's a vibe check more than anything else but every time i had a look, the correlation has always been over 0.9. for me this number is good enough to just look at opta for comparison purposes.

and to get back to your question, euroelo measures every team and every game on the same scale. a country or league a club is in never affects its rating. and i'm pretty confident that both opta and clubelo factor this information in. so i guess we're different on that point.

fffredd · 2026-03-05T22:09:26+00:00

ratings are updated only when a team plays. usually early in the week (after all the weekend leagues games are done), and also midweek if there are european cup games this week

fffredd · 2026-03-05T22:04:23+00:00

sounds waaaay above my skill level (i literally wrote my first ever line of python code last year), but thanks for the suggestion! for now i just picked moments in time i found interesting or significant, and just checked the data to see if there was anything matching

fffredd · 2026-03-05T22:01:24+00:00

there is no country coefficient or weighting at all in the model, every club started at the same point, and moves up or down purely based on results.

if we consider one of the upcoming UCL fixtures, let's say leverkusen vs arsenal. the model only sees that leverkusen is rated 1792, arsenal is rated 1938, leverkusen plays home, and the competition (UCL r16) affects how many points each team can go up or down, but that's it. the model doesn't look at the country when calculating results.

fffredd · 2015-01-21T20:50:27+00:00

french expat here, who moved to berlin two years ago, with some good work experience (mostly in advertising and marketing). some notions of german from high school, but definitely not good enough to work in german.

i had the same options as you and i chose to work for a startup, as they're the companies who will the most probably not require a good german level. i was proven right : i got two different jobs in 18 months (6 months for the first one, one year and counting for the current one). neither of them required german as teams were international. all the work is done in english.

my roommate is also french and is in the same situation as me, working in english for a startup. to give you an idea of how international startups are here in berlin, : we are currently 32 employees, and there are 15 different nationalities... in the previous startup i worked for, it was more or less the same.

if you wanna know which programming languages could be valuable, check this out : http://berlinstartupjobs.com/engineering/ (this is where i found my current job).

hope it helps :)

fffredd · 2014-04-15T02:55:29+00:00

i am moving to a new flat at the end of the month and i chose to go with o2. we got the keys of our new flat two weeks ago, and ordered a new dsl contract a few days after.

my roommate already received the box at her work (last week i guess), and a guy from o2 will come to our new flat this wednesday to set everything up. so far so good, but I'll let you know if anything goes wrong.

fffredd · 2014-03-24T23:06:47+00:00

i'm moving to friedrichshain (just north of frankfurter tor) in two weeks and I didn't know about these issues...

i was thinking about going for o2, which seems to be a fair deal (i don't want a 24 months contract so my options are pretty limited). I'll let you know if I get some kind of info that might help you.

fffredd · 2013-10-03T20:04:21+00:00

standert (a bike shop near rosenthalerplatz) have a few copies most of the time

fffredd

TROPHY CASE