Quote:
Originally Posted by Elrazor
bolded conclusion is obviously wack and in fact the study even goes further:
Quote:
Elimination from [european competition] tends to have a negative effect on domestic league performance when compared to performance during participation in the competition. This surprising result may be related to the fact that participation in European Cups is a key motivation factor for players and elimination may unconsciously provoke a loss in personal involvement for the rest of the season. Another possible explanation is the difficulty for coaches to manage large squads with fewer games to be played.
so i played around with their numbers for a bit to figure out where they went wrong. here's my theory.
i think they've looked at pre & post euro-KO league game ppg numbers for each team, weighed according to how many games were played in each column, and averaged the lot.
this makes sense on the face of it because if you play 9 games before-KO and 27 games after-KO then your after-KO average should count for 3x as much in the bulk stats. right?
well there's a snag with that: teams which get KO'd early are overrepresented in the after-KO data. this is problem.
better method: compare like with like.
of the 487 seasons they supplied data for, 261 (53.9%) showed an
increase in points per game when european competition was out of the way for the team in question.
restricted to top 5 leagues (blitw, bundeslol, loliga, seria a, lique uh) it's 77 out of 142 (54.2%).
this is a pretty slapdash/amateurish way to analyse the data (the benefit is that it took 15 mins), but at least i'm comparing barca with barca, rather than barca with krasnoyarsk FC.
my conclusion: majority of teams do better when europe is out of the way. as any thinking person would expect.
btw before someone gotchas me, i've only been thinking about this for an hour or something so i wouldn't put my house on being right about their method & its (supposed) flaw. but at least my conclusion concurs with what both the fat bloke in the pub and der markt have known for ages. so i suspect i'm right.
Last edited by BAIDS; 03-06-2016 at 09:06 PM.