🇳🇱 Netherlands is going to drop to 7th, losing a Champions League ticket to 🇵🇹 Portugal. While technically they are still ahead, League Stage bonus points will change this. 🇳🇱 will likely see 5/6 (!) teams eliminated in the group stage, 🇵🇹 instead, will see 4/4 teams qualify.

Just to drive home what a great format the new Champions League is — with 1 game to go 30 out of 36 teams still have something to play for.

A great opportunity to showcase your skills to the wider sports analytics industry! We've had multiple recent presenters go on to join the Opta data science group. ⚽📐🐍

Bayesian goal models are back in penaltyblog v1.8.0 - and this time, they’re dependency-free! ⚽️📈

We are hiring! Are you a data scientist and looking for a career in football? Come work in our Data Science team at Stats Perform: tinyurl.com/statsperformds (India-based only for now, EU-people stay tuned)

We are hiring! Are you a data scientist and looking for a career in football? Come work in our Data Science team at Stats Perform: tinyurl.com/statsperformds (India-based only for now, EU-people stay tuned)

The Oxford word of the year is RAGE BAIT. After calming myself down, I tried to work out what the football word of the year would be, 2000-25. www.nytimes.com/athletic/687...

Champions League update! 🔹 Arsenal still on top! PSG joins the fight for first after an away win at Barca. 🔹 Qarabağ with 2 wins! Now 75% likely to make the next round. 🔸 Both Dutch teams in bottom 6 teams — heading towards elimination. 🔸 Athletic Club with 2 losses heading towards an early exit.

Had a chat with @sport.nos.nl about the dire start of the European season for the Netherlands, and how it affects their chances of maintaining 6th on the UEFA Coefficients ranking.

Battle for Top 10, good for direct UCL ticket: 78% —🇹🇷 Turkey (-12%) 60% —🇵🇱 Poland (+5%) 36% —🇨🇿 Czechia (-1%) 26% —🇬🇷 Greece (+8%) Battle for Top 15, good for 1 extra European ticket: 51% — 🇨🇾Cyprus (+18%) 37% —🇦🇹Austria (-13%) 8% —🇨🇭Switzerland (-7%) 5% —🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland (-2%)

🇩🇪 Germany climbing up the ranks of the yearly Coefficients ranking — good for a bonus Champions League ticket. Two wins this week sees them rise from 5th to 3rd most likely to grab a ticket. England and Italy still favourites.

Here's the consequences for 🇳🇱 the Netherlands after 5 losses in 5 games. 🔹 From 80% of 6th down to almost 50%. 🔹 Even chances of dropping below Belgium, up from <0.1% to now 1.7%. All that while the Netherlands still have 6/6 teams, while Portugal have lost 1 and Belgium already lost 2!

New year, new coefficients simulation! ⚠️This year is the first time I've seen where the Big 4 might actually be challenged, as 🇫🇷 France _could_ overtake 🇩🇪 Germany. Being Top 4 gives you 4 direct UCL spots, which are now at risk for Germany, after some poor seasons in Europe.

Finally, here's our Conference League predictions. Again an English team favourites to win the League Stage — just like Chelsea was last year. Top 24 achievable for all, even lowest rated teams Shelbourne/Aberdeen with a ±20% chance!

In the Europa League, English teams are once again favoured to make an impression. Here's how we estimate each teams' likelihood of Top 8 and Top 24 in the League Stage.

A new #ChampionsLeague season is upon us! Here's each team's likelihood of qualifying for Top 8 or 24, according to our predictions:

First place is lava!

🚨The third and final blog post in our series on possession value models design decisions🔍: Can the features chosen to represent the game state inadvertently bias player ratings? w/ @probberechts.bsky.social @jessejdavis.bsky.social Lode Van Tente dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

I love using em dashes (—) whenever I write something, but now it seems people will just think I'm using an LLM. 💀

Not many changes on the coefficients table: 🇳🇴 Bodo/Glimt win means Norway overtakes Greece 🇵🇱 Both Polish teams lose, and 🇦🇹 Rapid Wien with a win, which means places 13-15 look mostly set. 🇸🇪 Djurgården lose and thus Sweden less like to overtake Croatia or Cyprus.

After Lazio's 2-0 loss last night, the battle for the Champions League bonus ticket is just about over. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England's #5 is guaranteed a CL ticket 🇪🇸 Spain's #5 is 99.8% sure For 🇩🇪 and 🇮🇹 having 8 teams didn't help, but in the end they also didn't perform at the level needed.

[NEW] First blog in a long time! In which I show a pretty straightforward way to derive teams' attacking and defensive strengths from bookmaker odds. This method is not only easy to implement, but also very accurate compared to results-based models. mackayanalytics.nl/2025/04/01/g...

[NEW] First blog in a long time! In which I show a pretty straightforward way to derive teams' attacking and defensive strengths from bookmaker odds. This method is not only easy to implement, but also very accurate compared to results-based models. mackayanalytics.nl/2025/04/01/g...

I've been catfishing you all for too long — I've actually been bald for quite some years now so figured it was time to update my profile picture accordingly as well...

We're expanding our team of Data Analysts so if you want to work for Opta and create new visualisations, dive into the data to find insights for clients and chat about sport all day, apply here. We're open to remote workers to get the best candidates. eobe.fa.em2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

⚽ New blog post - which football prediction model is the best? Poisson, Weibull, or Negative Binomial — each has its strengths and weaknesses. Learn how to optimise them for accurate match predictions using my penaltyblog Python package. pena.lt/y/2025/03/10... #FootballAnalytics #DataScience

The battle for Top 15 in the UEFA Coefficients ranking is done! 🇵🇱 Poland overtakes Denmark into 15th. At the same time, both 🇩🇰 Denmark and 🇨🇭Switzerland lose their final teams, meaning they can't retake 15th. This also guarantees Top 15 for both 🇦🇹 Austria and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland.

🇨🇿 Czechia ends the season in 9th, after Fenerbahçe's exit on penalties last night means 🇹🇷 Türkiye can no longer overtake them. 🇳🇱 Netherlands ends this year with the 8th highest coefficient, behind 🇵🇹 Portugal and 🇧🇪 Belgium — but maintains 6th in the 5-year ranking for now.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England need 1 more win (or 2 draws), in any of the 3 leagues, to be mathematically sure of a bonus Champions League ticket next season. 🇪🇸 Spain also very close after Bilbao eliminated Roma in a direct match-up. Some really weird results need to happen for Spain to miss out.

🚨 We're hiring at Chelsea FC!🔵 🚨 This is a unique opportunity to join our analytics team and be at the heart of decision-making at a fantastic club. Full Stack Web Developer: linkedin.com/jobs/view/41... Data Engineer: linkedin.com/jobs/view/41... Full post: www.linkedin.com/posts/javion...

Poland getting even closer to Top 15 finish, which gives 2 UCL tickets. Only one extra win away from overtaking Denmark. Likelihood of Top 15: 99.8% — 🇦🇹 Austria (+0.1%) 99.4% — 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland (+5.4%) 80.0% — 🇵🇱 Poland (+15.0%) 16.9% — 🇩🇰Denmark (-11.6%) 3.9% — 🇨🇭Switzerland (-8.9%)

Both 🇨🇿 and 🇹🇷 lose their only game, which is great news for Czechia. A 1-0 win for Fenerbahçe next week will NOT be enough for 🇹🇷. It will put both countries on 43.9, but 🇨🇿 has the better year coefficient which is the next tiebreaker. Only a Fenerbahçe comeback can save 🇹🇷

Bonus Champions League ticket update: 🇮🇹 Italy grabs the last lifeline with 3/4 wins, among one a win against a Spanish team. 🇪🇸 Spain still favoured however with 6 teams still playing for now. England can start partying, only a miracle collapse can see them miss out.

The race for the UCL bonus ticket as it has progressed so far. While 🇮🇹 Italy messed up in the KO-round of the Champions League, it was always an uphill battle, having 8 teams playing rather than 7 for Spain/England. Hence, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England / 🇪🇸 Spain were favourites from the start.

🇮🇹 THREE Italian teams got eliminated this week, in matchups they were expected to win or at least have a good shot. This has significantly hurt their chances of ending in the yearly Top 2 Coefficients Ranking, which gets you a bonus UCL ticket next year.

Post-draw update for the Coefficients Ranking. 🇳🇱 Netherlands has all but successfully held off Portugal and maintains 6th. Twente's exit (and Ajax' missed points) mean it's unlikely they will overtake 🇫🇷 France. 🇨🇿 Plzen makes a comeback and keeps Czechia in the race for 9th.

🇪🇸 Spain overtakes 🇮🇹 Italy in the battle for the Champions League bonus ticket (although barely...) Spain with a measly 0.3 point lead over Italy — and about as many expected points in the remainder of the season. This could really go either way at this point.

Three spots remaining for Top 15 (and 2 UCL tickets): 🇵🇱 Jagiellonia with a big win, putting Poland on track for Top 15, at the cost of Denmark. Odds: 99.8% — 🇦🇹 Austria (+0.8%) 94.6% — 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland (+1.4%) 65.5% — 🇵🇱 Poland (+33.4%) 25.9% — 🇩🇰Denmark (-40.4%) 14.3% — 🇨🇭Switzerland (+4.8%)

Time for some "coëfficiëntenpolonaise" for the Dutch 🇳🇱! 4W1L in the first round of knockouts, puts them in a great spot and it's unlikely 🇵🇹 Portugal will overtake them before the end of the season. Still an outside shot of overtaking 🇫🇷 France, though very unlikely.

Knockout stage season is upon us! Here's the countries most likely to get a bonus Champions League ticket for next season. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England already 3+ points ahead of the rest, and 7/7 teams remaining. They'll likely get the 1st ticket. Other ticket between 🇮🇹 Italy and 🇪🇸 Spain, who both lost 1 team.

With the League Phases out of the way, things are beginning to become clearer in the UEFA Coefficients Ranking. 🇳🇱 Netherlands favoured for #6 over 🇵🇹 Portugal 🇹🇷 Türkiye slightly favoured for #9 over 🇨🇿 Czechia. They've got 0.8 points to make up but 2 teams still playing vs 1 from Czechia.

So I made this plot back in September. It stated that 10 points would be enough to qualify for Top 24 in 99% of the simulations. Clearly this didn't materialise — Dinamo Zagreb got knocked out with 11 points. Some thoughts 👇

Manchester City are through! But... In the next round they'll face one of: 🔸 Real Madrid 🔸 Bayern Munich Yikes.

⚽ 𝐌𝐈𝐓 𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬 In case you missed it (I did), the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Research Papers have been released! This year there are 3 football papers, find all of them below. 📎 tinyurl.com/ssac25

One of the rare occasions I’ve actually enjoyed working on a table theanalyst.com/eu/2025/01/c...

🇬🇷 Greece guaranteed Top 15! Also likely to end in 11th. This is exactly like we predicted back at the start of the season, when they were still in 15th! Other odds of Top 15: 99.8% — 🇳🇴 Norway 98.3% — 🇦🇹 Austria 82.3% — 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland 64.9% — 🇩🇰 Denmark 🇵🇱 Poland and🇨🇭Switzerland likely missing out.

Who gets a bonus Champions League ticket next season? Only 3 countries with a good shot: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 not with the greatest week but still very likely to make top 2 🇮🇹 increase their odds to 76% 🇪🇸 the only other country still with a realistic shot 🇵🇹 folds after a terrible week (4L)

🇳🇱 vs 🇵🇹 🇳🇱 Netherlands (4W, 1L) have at least 4 teams advancing + Twente still with good odds. 🇵🇹 Portugal (4L), however, still have 4 teams with serious risk of elimination. Their bad performances also has cost a lot of potential bonus points. Result: 🇳🇱 now solid favourite to maintain 6th!

Just the 1 game remaining in the Europa League! 🔹Only Lazio is certain of Top 8 🔹Play-off reached by AZ, Union SG, Viktoria Plzen, Bodø/Glimt and probably PAOK 🔸Porto, Fenerbahçe, Roma, Besiktas at serious risk of elimination (among others).