By 'you' I mean Europe and the UK. EPL Talk put up a couple good posts about soccer stats today. They didn't necessarily go into the stats themselves but made some very good points about the direction of Premier League Soccer. I know I mention EPL Talk more then I should here, but I find their posts and way of writing approachable. I do find error in the way they analysed cards today but really appreciate the fact that they went out and dug into it themselves and hope they do it more in the future.
It is interesting to me because a little bit ago I went into the cleanest and dirtiest teams in the league this year in a similar way and found Stoke to be the one of the "cleanest". They found them, by looking at cards over a couple decades, to be the dirtiest. I thought about looking at only yellow and red cards but found that a small but significant percentage of them come from descent, time wasting or other non-rough play. Example would be Man U's goalie over the weekend. His disagreement with the ref was certainly not dirty or rough play. I found, in looking at fouls, that sort of thing happening in the case of 'cards' too often.
Anyway, this gets me motivated on picking apart the table again. Last time I did a pretty good job at pulling out the trip down the table for Blackpool and the trip up for Liverpool.
Oh, and got another good Stoke comment from EPL Talk:
"This confirms what i already knew, that Stoke were a bunch of dirty ****s and should as Arseblogger said “been beaten to death with there mothers arms by a gang of angry warlocks”."
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