Category: Football

Five last minutes are a mine of points for Real Madrid

FC Barcelona would have won two more championships considering the games to end at minute 85

If you’re a Barça fan this should sound very familiar to you: it’s Sunday in the afternoon, you were at the movies. As you leave the theater and switch on the cell phone you get some messages about Real Madrid’s game. Real isn’t winning and there are just 20 minutes left. Don’t trust, but step into a bar to watch the rest of the game though. Let’s go, maybe there’s some good news on the way. 75 minutes and still a tie game, 80 minutes, 85 minutes, almost… but in the end Real Madrid scores, and you go home upset because of a game you were not supposed to have watched. Among the most common Barça supporters mantra’s, there is the one which says that Real Madrid scores last-gasp winners very often. What truth is there in this complaint?
 >>> “Five last minutes are a mine of points for Real Madrid”

The field factor and the referee’s influence

The referees award almost the same fouls to home teams as to away ones, but away players are sent off more easily

Finished the previous post telling about one of my reference books here in this blog: Scorecasting: The hidden influences behind how sports are played and games are won. One of the studies that the book mentions was made by two Spanish economists that in 2005 set out to see how peer pressure affects human decisions. Luis Garicano and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta counted the extra minutes added by referees in the Spanish league, taking into account the result of the score in the 90th minute. >>> “The field factor and the referee’s influence”

Playing at home is no longer the advantage it used to be

A study of every match of the 5 most important European football leagues since 1970 up to nowadays. Overall, at the end of the 70’s teams retained almost 70% of home points, whereas in the last seasons this figure has come down even below 60%

To start this blog site I get back an article I published on the newspaper ARA on august 2015. A study about the scores of the 5 main European football leagues, based on a database I made up using datasets from football-data.co.uk. I’ve split it into two halves. Here comes the first one: >>> “Playing at home is no longer the advantage it used to be”