About
About 5 Added Minutes
5 Added Minutes uses data and statistical analysis to find football truths.
Recycled myths and opinions from ‘experts’ and fans dominate daily discussion; a bit of research and analysis often shows these views to be misguided. Used in the right context, numbers can reveal what’s true or false, significant or insignificant, and important or irrelevant.
You can ‘like’ 5 Added Minutes on Facebook
About the author
I’m Omar Chaudhuri – I research and write all the posts on 5 Added Minutes. I’m an Economics graduate from the University of Warwick, and Head of Football Intelligence at 21st Club. I’ve previously worked at Prozone Sports and Decision Technology. All views expressed on this blog are my own.
You can follow me on Twitter – @OmarChaudhuri.
8 Comments
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5 Added Minutes 
Came across your blog on Talksport’s Facebook comments. I look forward to checking it out! I love reading different views on football.
If you get a chance, check us out too! http://www.blackandbluesports.com
Perhaps we can add each other to our blog rolls?
Any way, good stuff!
Tim,
Hi. Intrigued by the article in May on competitiveness in the Premier League (and Spain). I am doing a piece on the effect that the Premier League and the Champions League for the Cambridge University Football Companion. The most common criticism is that over the last two decades, the biggest European leagues have become increasingly dominated by a handful of rich clubs. How true is this? I am looking for statistical measures of competitivity to use as graphs or charts (obviously credited). I would be interested in the stats you use. Can you think of any other measures of competitiveness? There is obviously the question of how much turnover there is in the top 5 or 4 or 3 or 2 in a league over a period of time. I would be very grateful for your help.
(PS couldn’t find the article you referred to on the statto site)
Peter Berlin
Hi Peter, thanks for your interest. The statto link for results against top/bottom half is here: http://www.statto.com/football/stats/england/premier-league/2011-2012/versus-top-half/full For each league you’ll find a ‘vs Top Half’ and ‘vs. Bottom Half’ on the left hand side.
As for measures of competition, I would suggest reading some of Soccer By the Numbers’ articles in June – http://www.soccerbythenumbers.com/2011_06_01_archive.html He looks at using the Gini coefficient as well as win variances across the big leagues. His methods certainly have more economic basis than mine – I used a fairly arbitrary measure. The comments below my article do throw up a few suggestions too.
many thanks
Dear Omar,
I am very keen to do some data mining research on team formations and team strategies, and it seems that Prozone tracking data is the right dataset for us. Is it possible to obtain it for research purposes? There are numerous scientific publications mentioning Prozone sets, but the policies are still unclear for me… Thanks!
Hi Omar,
Came across your site and loved your posts – any chance you would consider doing one or two guest posts over @superbetting.com? We’re a social betting community and would love to have a few blog posts with some solid knowledge about crunching numbers in sports. Shoot me an email please.
MIke
How do you simulate football matches? What do you use? Kindly let me know. Thanks.
West Ham have just let in an equaliser in the 7th minute of extra time… 12 seconds before the whistle. It is my belief that the Hammers let in more goals after 90 minutes that any other side in history! Moreover, they seem to let in more goals after 80 minutes than anyone else. Particularly under Allardyce, no one seemed to know that games lasted 90 minutes: they’d all wind up after about 78 minutes… and let in vital goals. Am I right, or just a Hammers fan?