vorosmccracken.com

Whoops, I took a quick nap there. I’m up now so I’m back. Let’s see what time it… HOLY CRAP! SIX YEARS???!!!

Well yeah, that’s a little too long a layoff. Anyhow, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to fire up the old soccer neurons and use a bunch of my new found skills and technology to update my soccer ratings and projection system. [Read more →]

A look at the qualification chances for Euro 2012 is up on ESPN Insider.

Insider is a pay area of ESPN which is a big reason why they can pay me. It’s a couple bucks a month, generally, and you get it for free if you already have a subscription to ESPN the Magazine. For the foreseeable future, that is where things like this from me will be, whether for the Euros or for the World Cup.

Whether that’s worth a subscription or not to you is entirely up to you. I can tell you that ESPN has been working very hard to expand it’s soccer (football) coverage which is reason one why they hired me, but it’s also true that they cover the more traditional “American” sports very heavily (one of which I’ll also be doing some work for them). Scope it out and see if it makes sense for you to buy it.

Still trying to nail down the final details, and the Aruba/St. Lucia matches got pushed forward so they haven’t happened yet. But Montserrat and Belize kick off 2014 World Cup Qualifying tomorrow in T&T (Montserrat generally isn’t able to host its home matches because of problems with facilities).

Anyhow, based on past results, this isn’t much of a contest based on the ratings and 10,000 sims, this one goes to Belize 99.96% of the time and Montserrat 0.04% and as of now the system probably underrates big favorites like this slightly (I’m working on this).

Then again word is Montserrat has searched Europe for players and may be bringing a better team than they normally field. Will that matter any? Probably not, but it’s worth knowing anyway.

As for the full set of sims, I’m working on the final details of how I’m going to do it this cycle (there’s a lot of complicated factors involved) and hope to have news by the weekend. Once that’s done I’ll let you know exactly how this is going to work. Thanks for your patience.

Voros

There won’t be any sims just yet as I’m still working on the final details of how it’s going to be done.

However the very first qualifier for 2014 gets played today between St. Lucia and Aruba who kick off a home and home series with a match in St. Lucia. So I’ll just quickly give the odds for this one and then try and get a full workup set in time before the next matchup starts in a week and a half.

Anyway, for anyone who is interested St. Lucia should be a heavy favorite here as the system has it 89.38% to 10.62% in their favor to emerge from the two legs victorious. Granted there isn’t much in the way of results to go on for Aruba as they’ve played 9 matches in the last eight years with eight losses and a draw against the Netherland Antilles. St. Lucia has played more often, 29 times winning 6 and drawing 4.

Stay tuned as very soon I’ll know exactly how the qualifying sims will be presented (and where) and once that’s taken care of, I’ll start running them!

Since fall of last year I’ve been doing statistical analysis on football for a private company and that has restricted my ability to post here.

I’ve also started to write about soccer and baseball for ESPN Insider, the first article of which was published last Friday.

However that doesn’t necessarily spell the end of things here. The first qualification matches for 2014 are scheduled to begin in Asia at the end of June. My hope is that I’ll be able to figure out a way to continue to update qualification chances, this time from the very start of the get go. This could happen here or elsewhere depending on how I do that. One way or the other, something will be decided by the end of May or the start if June and I’ll make sure to provide news on what will happen going forward.

I appreciate the folks who followed this last time around, and I hope I’ll be able to continue to do so this time around. Stay tuned.

I thought an interesting experiment would be to port the National Team Rankings over to club football and see what they come up with. So as a start, I gathered up all the league and FA Cup matches for the first five divisions in the English Pyramid the last four years. Promotion and Relegation provide us with the necessary sample sizes to do this, and the FA Cup matches help increase that sample as well. I’ll start by simpling posting the rankings: [Read more →]

Well there’s 63 games played and only one left to go. One team will collect it’s first ever World Cup, sending one of the two football mad countries into delirium and making National Heroes out of 23 players. [Read more →]

We’re down to the last four teams, and the favorites, Brazil, have been knocked out. The good news for them, I suppose, is that when they got knocked out, they also became the first team to qualify for the 2014 World Cup. Silver linings and such.

The National Team Rankings have been recalculated (this is the most I’ve ever recalculated these things in such a short time frame) and because of Germany’s impressive back to back wins over teams ranked just ahead of them, they’ve surged into fourth place. Now three of the final four teams are ranked in the top four (Spain and the Netherlands remain 2nd and 3rd respectively, same as pre-tournament). The rankings can be found here. [Read more →]

Alright there’s eight teams left and the three biggest pre-tournament favorites remain in the competition. Five of the top six also remain with only England falling out from that group.

EDIT: A Minor Mathematical Error made the original numbers slightly off. These are no corrected. This error affected nothing until the “Knockout Stages post.” That’s what I get for trying to rush things. It has been caught now.

The National Team rankings have been updated again. They are here. Germany’s big result against the English also sees them jump past the English into the number five ranking. Ghana continues to make slow progress up the boards to number 36 and is now the lowest ranked team left in the tournament. [Read more →]

I’m going to do this as quick as possible because of the computer caused delay.

Here’s the new ratings including all games as of the end of the Group Stages (though not counting the just completed game between Uruguay and South Korea). The two biggest things to note here is Italy dropping out of the Top 10 and Argentina edging past England into fourth place. [Read more →]