I mourn the loss of your hair...

Well. It’s me again here to do something I should have done a long time ago: give you the news of the past week! Continue Reading

Lordy. Barely halfway into David Villa’s first season, and people are wanting to trade him in for a goat. Now, I will say for the record, that if you haven’t had goat’s milk ice cream …. boy, howdy! Now I’m not sure that’s worth a striker, though there are a lot of guys I’d happily trade for some of that goat’s milk goodness. Just sayin’. But David Villa ain’t one of them.

And for the record, I’m a journalist. I work with words. I chose to work with words because they promised me that no math would be involved. And yet, here we go, with numbers.

As I said in the Bilbao Copa match review comments section, we have gone through this with Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and now David Villa. Let’s have a look at just what we’ve gone through, shall we, and where Villa will potentially sit.
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This post is about statistics. You have been warned.

Now then: isn’t Bojan adorable? Doesn’t Busi look like a horse? Shouldn’t we burn Ibra at the stake if he ever comes back to visit? These questions can all be answered, to some degree or another, with numbers. Bojan, for instance, is way more adorable when you say that he scored as many goals per minute as Ibra last season or if you point out that his productions levels at 20 are way ahead of Pedro’s at the same age—don’t forget that Pedro is already 23, after all. And Busi totally looks more like a horse if you replay the gif of him against Inter about 30 times.

The Ibra thing I won’t even get into because of the whole Hulk Smash thing I do when you disrespect The Guardiola and, really, my lovely lady is getting tired of replacing the coffee table (and you wondered how Ikea made so much money–aha! Now I know it’s a dastardly Swedish plot to get at my moolah!).
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Kevin has written a review of the Athletic match which, if you haven’t read it, should be your first stop. Besides joy at watching Banjo Crickets get his two goals and our team continuing to look like a brilliant machine of goal-making beauty, there was the obvious “Oh shit” of hearing that both Ibra and Pique could be out for the clásico next Saturday. I’ll cover much more of that in tomorrow’s Arsenal second leg preview, but suffice to say that I’m arching eyebrows in concern.

I’m here, though, not to discuss negative outlooks on the coming matches, but rather to give some updates about various topics. Check ‘em out after the jump.

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This post was written by reader Luke, who wins eternal brownie points for this.

Being an American fan of FC Barcelona is sometimes trying. It is often times difficult to find team information—let’s be honest, Goal.com is useless about 94% of the time—as well as intelligent qualitative analysis of games and team decisions, as Soccernet almost exclusively covers the EPL. Finding games, even those in La Liga, can require an abacus, a farmer’s almanac, and a working knowledge of the timing of Haley’s Comet. But it is times like this when it is all worth it, when Barça completes the most historic and dominant season in the history of club football, and maybe even all professional sports. As Americans, we always attempt to compare teams, even across different eras when it may be impossible; what follows is my best effort to put this achievement into perspective.

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Nate Silver: Rock Star

I like Nate Silver. I read his political blog virtually every day and followed it religiously during the 2008 presidential election cycle here in the US. He’s a man who knows his statistics and also his sports: he writes for Baseball Prospectus and uses more decimals than I do. A lot more. So yeah, I like Nate Silver and when I learned that he was involved in ESPN’s Soccer Power Index (SPI), I was pretty excited. After all, Nate has a bigger brain than I do and maybe I would be able to learn a few things about approaching football/soccer statistically.

Nate’s article is here. The actual SPI rankings are here and you can the full methodology here. You can read about how smart the guy is here. Continue Reading