Sports Analytics Weekly by kubeia.io - 42/2025
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🎲 Betting
Square Is As Square Does: A Critical Analysis of FanDuel Analytics
wordpress.com
To summarize, Jason Feldman and Keith Goldner from Fanduel take us through their model for a market where you pick a combination of two digits and the bet wins if the score after ANY quarter of an NFL game has that combination of last digits.I love this kind of stuff because it gives an inside look into a company’s operations, in more detail than is typically made available to the public. I love that from an advantage player’s perspective in a Sun Tzu “know your enemy” kind of way, but I also love it as an analyst to see someone else’s approach to a problem – especially a problem that I have worked on in the past and have tackled in a very different way than what Fanduel has done.
Gradient Descent Comes to the Five-Year Plan
medium.com - Valeriy Manokhin
This is the story of how gradient descent — the workhorse of modern AI — grew out of five-year plans, control theory, and a relentless Soviet obsession with convergence.
đź“ť Sports Analytics
How Can Clubs Objectively Compare Talent Across Leagues?
substack.com - Alex Marin Felices
The following summary critically reviews the research paper titled “Translating Talent: A Cross-League Plus-Minus Approach in Soccer" by Gabriel Barbosa and Amod Sahasrabudhe. All data, figures, and analysis presented here are drawn from their original work; I do not claim any authorship or ownership of the content. This summary has been written to provide a concise and technically informed synthesis of the paper’s findings, methodologies, and implications, while maintaining fidelity to the authors’ intellectual contributions.
Can Player Positioning Be Rated Without Expert Knowledge?
substack.com - Alex Marin Felices
The following summary critically reviews the research paper titled “Learning to Rate Player Positioning in Soccer” by Uwe Dick and Ulf Brefeld. All data, figures, and analysis presented here are drawn from their original work; I do not claim any authorship or ownership of the content. This summary has been written to provide a concise and technically informed synthesis of the paper’s findings, methodologies, and implications, while maintaining fidelity to the authors’ intellectual contributions.
How Do Newly Promoted Clubs Survive In The EPL?
winningwithanalytics.com - Bill Gerrard
Part 2: The Four Survival KPIsThe first part of this two-part consideration of the prospects of newly promoted clubs surviving in the English Premier League (EPL) concluded that the lower survival rate in recent seasons was due to poorer defensive records rather than any systematic reduction in wage expenditure relative to other EPL clubs. It was also suggested that there might be a Moneyball-type inefficiency with newly promoted teams possibly allocating too large a proportion of their wage budget to over-valued strikers when more priority should be given to improving defensive effectiveness. In this post, the focus is on identifying four key performance indicators (KPIs) for newly promoted clubs that I will call the “survival KPIs”. These survival KPIs are then combined using a logistic regression model to determine the current survival probabilities of Burnley, Leeds United and Sunderland in the EPL this season.
đź’° Quantitative Finance
The Paradoxical Efficient Market Hypothesis
3quarksdaily.com - John Allen Paulos
Election season has put an increased focus on the stock market, but little attention is ever paid to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (the EMH, for short). As I’ve written in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, it is a fundamental and important notion, but it is also a little weird. Its recent formulation derives from the work of Eugene Fama, economist Paul Samuelson, and others in the 1960s. The basic idea, however, dates back more than 100 years when Louis Bachelier, a student of the great French mathematician Henri Poincare, formulated an early version. Roughly, the hypothesis maintains that stock prices reflect all relevant information about the stock. As Fama put it, “In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation where, at any point in time, actual prices of individual securities already reflect the effects of information based both on events that have already occurred and on events which, as of now, the market expects to take place in the future.”