Wrap Up: Season Long EPL Prediction Contest Results

As an exercise in humility and illustration of the concept of skill in forecasting I have run a few small prediction contests here over the past few years.

Here are the final standings of the 10 participants for 2012-2013:

Elijah 17.4 Megan 17.5 SKILL 17.8 Calvin 19.0 itzik 19.0 n-g 19.3 dave tombs 19.5 keeperusa 23.1 Arthur 23.2 Max 23.9 Pielke 24.0

Congrats to Elijah and Megan, the only two participants whose picks improved upon a naive baseline.  

The numbers above represent the square root of the sums of the mean-squared errors in the predicted standings. The biggest collective errors: West Brom (picked too low) and Newcastle (picked too high). Smallest errors: Man City, Arsenal and Reading.

What does this exercise tell us? The most important lesson, one that is learned in many walks of life, is that a naive prediction methodology can be very hard to beat. Only two entries outperformed an entry based on last year's final table.

The far more difficult question to answer, and one with an answer that has a lot of significance to decision making in areas far more important than sports prognostication -- are those 2 skillful entries showing skill because the forecasts had skill, or just luck?

For a discussion, see this post on hot hands and guaranteed winners.

Thanks all and congrats to the winners!

Goldblatt on the FIFA World Cup in Global History and Culture

David Goldblatt, the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, recently gave a keynote address at the FIFA World Cup Conference in Zurich. He talk was titled, "The FIFA World Cup and its Impact on Global History and Culture” (here in PDF, courtesy Peter Alegi's course, History of Soccer).

Here is how Goldblatt describes his focus:

Such is the global reach and cultural significance of football that the history of the World Cup provides an increasingly powerful lens for examining the course of globalization and global history over the last one hundred and twenty years. At the same time the history of the tournament allows us to see the dynamic of politics in individual nations and the construction of their national identities – all have been encoded in the ways in which the tournament has been staged, played, reported, celebrated and cursed.

To see the relationship between the World Cup and globalization more clearly, we need to divide our narrative into four eras: first, the prehistory of the tournament particularly football’s relationship with the Olympic movement and the Olympic games; second, the short inter war era of the World Cup between 1930 and 1938 played alongside a fragmenting global order; third, the World Cups of the long post war boom and the slow regulated globalisation that accompanied the Cold War; and finally, since 1982, the World Cups of the most recent era of globalization characterised by new geographies of global power and the unprecedented scale, size and significance of global financial and media networks.

Read the full lecture here in PDF.

Ronaldinho: Clever or Uncool?

Some fodder for debates about norms of the game.

H/T Ricardo.

Book Review: A Man in a Hurry

Before there was the English Premier League, before the NFL, there was the brief moment in the spotlight for pedestrianism, an early form of competitive walking that became very popular in the 1860s and 1870s in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Pedestrianism first started out as a trial of distance – sometimes vast -- against the clock and then evolved naturally into a race between men. The pedestrian movement saw a great rise and then all but disappeared, supplanted by contemporary competitions such as the marathon and the modern Olympics.

Fortunately, Nick Harris, Helen Harris and Paul Marshall have collaborated to stitch together what is a relatively thin historical record to provide a highly readable account of the life of Edward Payson Weston, the original and most famous pedestrian. Weston’s 90 years spanned 1839 to 1929, a time of enormous change, in the world and in sport and is chronicled in A Man in a Hurry: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Edward Payson Weston, The World’s Greatest Walker.

Weston’s competitive career was largely of his own creation; it began as a bet and turned into a business opportunity that he would exploit repeatedly such that it became a career and a calling. At the peak of his popularity more than 20,000 people turned out in London in 1876 to watch him walk around a track in a 6-day race in which he took on all comers. It may sound a bit odd to hear of 20,000 people turning out to watch men walk around a short oval track, yet today not far away from the location of Agricultural Hall in Islington 60,000 people turn out regularly to Emirates Stadium to watch 22 men kick around a ball on a rectangular pitch. Many years later, when Weston had become famous mostly just for being famous, he drew a reported half-million people to the streets of New York to watch him conclude a cross-country walk which had started in California.

The thinness of the historical record makes it difficult to get a good reading on who Weston actually was. Much more is known about the competitions that he participated in and walks that he took on, and so the book emphasizes these events in its recounting of Weston’s life. There are hints of snake oil salesman in Weston’s character, with tantalizing but ultimately unverified associations with illegal gambling and political corruption in the form of what today would be called match fixing. Weston preferred to walk in finely tailored and distinctive clothing, adding to the spectacle of the event. He made and lost several fortunes across his long life and throughout there were hints of a playboy lifestyle. In most respects none of this would be surprising to observers of star athletes today.

At his peak form Weston was known for his stamina and remarkable powers of recovery with little or no sleep. During Weston’s first visit to the UK, the British Medical Journal reported that he had been chewing coca leaf, from which cocaine is distilled, while he walked. The negative reaction and quick denials by Weston of more general usage illustrates that even at this time the notion of doping – a word that had yet to be invested – was a concern in sport. Weston’s use of the drug led to a spat among experts on the pages of the BMJ (another dynamic familiar to modern observers of sport) leading the journal to opine quite presciently:

“Pushed to excess, coca is said to become a narcotic; and we shall, no doubt, hear a great deal about its use and abuse. Possibly we may be indebted to Mr. Weston for the introduction of a new stimulant and a new narcotic: two forms of novelty in excitement which our modern civilization is likely to highly esteem.” 

Weston was no fool and quickly embraced science as a route to legitimacy, first presenting himself as a subject for scientific research and later extolling the virtues of walking for health and serving as one of the first anti-smoking advocates.

Pedestrianism’s moment in the spotlight did not last long. The automobile, organized sport and age saw Weston fade from public view. When he died senile and poor few turned out for his funeral. But over his 90 years he never stopped walking. Thanks to A Man in Hurry, this delightful part of sport history has been brought back into view.

The FA Cup and US Hurricane Damage

In a 2009 paper on the ability (actually, lack thereof) to predict US hurricane landfalls or damage on time scales of 5 years or less, I illustrated the perils of correlation shopping with the data shown in the graph above (paper here in PDF).

Over the period 1950 to 2007, in years which the score of the FA Cup final totaled 3 goals or greater, US hurricane damage in the subsequent season (June through December of the same year) was 31% greater than average. In years which saw 2 goals or less scored in the final, hurricane damage was 33% less than average. The relationship is remarkable. Chance you say? I once thought so too.

Little did I know that I had stumbled on to a  major scientific breakthrough. Since 2007, the FA Cup hurricane damage predictor (FACHDP for short) has correctly predicted 3 of the 5 seasons damage correctly. By contrast, sophisticated catastrophe models used in the financial world to assess risk correctly anticipated only 2 of those 5 years. Obviously, they have not yet caught up with the implications of this remarkable new discovery.

The mechanisms underlying the surprising predictive ability of the FA Cup are still being explored, but they are no doubt reflective of what some have called "a new normal" in hurricane behavior.

US coastal residents, Bermuda reinsurers and City financiers await today's match with great anticipation.

Jens Sejer Andersen: FIFA’s New Ethics Committee Fails First Test

Over at Play the Game, Jens Sejer Andersen takes a clear-eyed look at the recent report of the FIFA Ethics Committee on the so-called ISL case and finds it to be a failure.  Andersen summarizes (but do read the post in full):

In its totality the report of judge Eckert is a disappointing piece of work, and as long as the public is prevented from studying the investigations of Michael J. Garcia, Eckert has to carry the full responsibility for the flaws that can be summarized as follows:

1. Out of the 142 million CHF handed out as bribes by ISL, more than 100 million are still unaccounted for. Eckert does not mention this fact at all. Did FIFA’s Ethics Committee forget to ask those people in FIFA and around FIFA who are likely to know more about this huge sum of unidentified bribes. If the committee did ask, but without success, shouldn’t the public know about this culture of denial?
   
2. As earlier stated, Blatter and other FIFA officials are cleared of several charges only on the ground that FIFA regulations were unsatisfying or non-existent at the time of events. Thereby the new, independent Ethics Committee fails to meet the expectations that the outside world has rightly had of decisions based on independent consideration of ethical questions and not only on well-known legal formalities.
   
3. The Ethics Committee has an unclear stand on the key question if it was ethically ok for Sepp Blatter as FIFA Secretary General to watch passively in the 1990ies while the biggest corruption scandal in sport unfolded among his closest allies.
   
4. Eckert does not lay out the premises behind his few assessments of ethical character – for instance the description of Blatter as “clumsy”.
   
5. The Ethics Committee declares this case for closed without dealing an inch with the fact that Sepp Blatter over ten years, from 2001 to 2011, used all his powers to keep the ISL-affair secret with lies, threats and manipulation. This happened also after the introduction of an Ethics Code in 2004. Why has the Ethics Committee not pronounced itself on this behavior?
   
6. Especially big sums of FIFA money were used by Blatter on lawyers’ fees to make the courts ensure that nothing came out about the persons involved in the post-bankruptcy negotiations or about the settlement that ended the ISL case in the Swiss legal system. Was this an ethical use of FIFA’s resources, or an unethical attempt to cover it all up?
   
7. Sepp Blatter avoided over two years, from 2010 to 2012 – to publish the ISL settlement, although he was free to do so and although he said from October 2011 that he would like to. He claimed in contrast to the truth that the other parties in the case prevented him from doing so. Proper ethics, Mr. Eckert?
   
8. Although judge Eckert recognizes that key persons in FIFA have rejected to cooperate in the investigations, that FIFA investigators do not dispose of the same powerful tools as the real police and that various important case facts remain in the dark, he chooses on this fragile foundation to wipe all doubts aside, declare case closed and exonerate all FIFA officials in the future. Effective, perhaps. But ethically sustainable?

So much for the failed responsibilities of the Ethics Committee. The real responsibility rests of course with the political level of FIFA, with Blatter, with the ExCo and with the general assembly. If FIFA leadership believes that the Ethics Committee has done an excellent job, why not support this evaluation by publishing all papers produced by investigator Garcia?

 Andersen points to the IOC and US authorities as possible venues for further investigations of FIFA. For its part, FIFA clearly hopes that the sham report will serve to sweep the ISL case under the rug. Perhaps so, but I am skeptical.

The work of FIFA reform has a long way to go.

Slightly Higher Salaries, More Equity in the MLS

Last May I showed that the income distribution in Major League Soccer was akin to that which might be found in Haiti -- that is to say, lots and lots of people at the low end of the income scale and a few at the top. The league has just released its 2013 salary information (H/T @FutbalIntellect).

I can report that the MLS Gini Index (a conventional measure of income inequality) has decreased (become more equal) from about 57 to 53 -- so rather than Haiti as an analogue, think Panama. The graph at the top of this post comes from this nifty online calculator.

Some other facts:

• The MLS has 8 millionaires by salary
• 106 players (of 557) make >$200,000
• 249 make >$100,000 (this is also the median income of males 25+ with a professional degree)
• 308 make <$100,000, down from 328 last year.
• 154 make <$50,000

Obviously, the MLS has a long way to go to be able to afford top talent from top to bottom.

FIFA Closes the Books on the ISL Case

Today FIFA released a short 8-page report on the so-called ISL case (here in PDF). The report, which describes a series of bribes or kickbacks received by FIFA officials from the now-defunct marketing company. The report concludes:

1. The ISL case is concluded for the Ethics Committee.
2. I note that Mr. Havelange resigned from his position as Honorary President effective from 18.04.2013 and that Dr. Nicolás Leoz resigned from his positions as a FIFA Executive Committee member, as a FIFA standing committee member and as CONMEBOL President effective from 24.04.2013. Hence, any further steps or suggestions are superfluous.
3. No further proceedings related to the ISL matter are warranted against any other football official.

The substance of the report -- what little there is -- has been commented on elsewhere, see Kier Radnedge, Sepp Blatter, Richard Conway, and Play the Game.

For his part, Sepp Blatter says that no one has tried to bribe him since 1986. Given the staggering scale of corruption involving many (if not most) of Blatter's colleagues now exposed, it is a remarkable statement, but I digress.

The release of the judgment reinforces FIFA's well-earned reputation for a lack of transparency.  The 8 page judgment notes:

The Report of Examination spans approximately 30 pages, and the documents obtained during the course of the examination, including the transcripts of testimonies, comprise approximately 4,200 pages.

Neither the 30 pages examination report nor the documents obtained during the investigation have been made available. Contrast this with the massive dump of information by USADA as part of its "reasoned decision" on doping in cycling.

FIFA finds itself asking people to "trust us" -- hardly a viable position for the organization. FIFA should make available its 30 paper investigation report and 4,200 pages of investigatory materials and allow its stakeholders to see for themselves.