Building a football system with data mining

[AstonMartin]

Evening all, I am a first time poster here so "Hi!". To cut a long story short... I am a geek... I specialise in data and as such am looking to build a football 1x2 system. I am here today to obtain some advise from more knowledgable people... I have built an SQL database from all the data that is available at http://www.football-data.co.uk/ and plan on data mining this to find trends which might not otherwise be easily visible. Are there any other data sources on the net available for downloading, web site viewing or purchasing? Opta is without question the holy grail when it comes to this kind of stuff however I'd imagine they are a little expensive. :) Anyways, my second question is: Form would appear to be normally viewed in the last 6 matches. What are peoples thoughts on this? Why is it 6 matches and not say 8 matches, or 3 matches? If analysing home form, or away form, surely 6 matches would be too long a period to view? (Afterall it is a third of a season...). Any thoughts on the above are welcome and if there is interest in this project I'll post progress on this thread going forward. Cheers, AM

[andypaps28]

Re: Building a football system with data mining Welcome. the website whoscored.com is very detailed, maybe worth a look. I actually think form should be 3 matches not even 6. Usually it's a space issue hence no more than 8, most publications & websites like to show 6, as it in the old days when the football pools was the major means of gambling on football - the national papers showed 6. The most important thing "in" form is actually looking at the teams played in their last few games. Sometimes teams will play 4 of the top 8 in a 6 game run , and it's very important to take account of the standard of the opposition. Vice versa a team may have had a a run of low quality opposition that's why a ranking for all teams is important. Someteams have bogey teams , they just never seem to do well against, Other key factors are players missing. Some teams fail to win in a run of games with a 1 or more key players out. The above are standard factors that most people can tell you about and mining has been done numerous times. The data you are using www.football-data.co.uk has odds attached from many bookmakers. Use 1 bookmaker and stick to it is my best advice there. You may see that teams with odds of 2-1, only win 20% of their games etc. There are so many factors that play a role that no system has been devised that takes account of all factors and then gives them the right weighting as it is a dynamic environment. The perfect model would change week to week and actually include weather (rain , wind etc) . also what kit the team was wearing. Some teams can use their home kits for away games when there is a clash of colours, research has shown these teams do better. There are lots of papers on it that go into probability theory with poisson distributions etc. Lady luck plays a role as there are always surprising results. This may be way out but it is key. I suggest you model ladyluck by looking at astrological factors. You would take account of the birthdays of the players that you would expect to play and see it their zodiac sign is in the ascendency or not. Do this for each team and you will get a well-being of the team on a particular match day. Where there is a clear advantage some weighted variable can be introduced. The piece of research that needs doing is going back over past data where shocks occured, maybe teams that were bigger than 5-1 to win ,then have a look at the actual players that took part, and their birthdays, (in relation to time of year) I believe a pattern / advantage will emerge. Yep , I said it was way out !!!!! Good luck