Within statistics the problem of ruin is well known. Imagine that one in twenty plays in a casino lead to financial ruin, i.e. you lose everything you have. That would mean that if twenty people play one night, one of them would probably be financially ruined. Or, to make matters worse, if you play for…

Everything is subjective. Nothing is objective. People mistake high convergence for objectivity. Everything you see, hear and feel is subjective. It is your brain who creates your subjective experience. You have a Bayesian brain that creates expectations on the one hand and processes sense data on the other. Given that everything you read and all…

In football there is a lot of talk about systems. But what is a system? Thinking in terms of systems started with cybernetics during World War II. Where Turing was busy inventing the digital computer that we still use today as our PCs and our phones are Turing machines, the cybernetic group tried to invent…

A tautology is a statement that is always true because it basically affirms itself. “A bachelor is an unmarried man” if often quoted as an example of a tautology. Bachelor and unmarried are basically two different ways to say the same thing. All true statements in formal logic and mathematics are tautologies. So “2+2=4” is…

Football is much more of a thinking sport than a doing sport. Good examples of a doing sport are athletics or gymnastics. Doing sports are more about physical prowess and lack an element of gaming. Thinking sports are more often team sports and have matches where you play against each other. So a thinking sport…

Every theory is underdetermined by the data. This means that any set of data can prove multiple theories. In fact there will always be more than one theory that is supported by the data, no matter how much data you collect.  Underdetermination means that there is some determination by the data but not enough to…

xG stands for Expected Goals. xG is – as of this writing (4-10-2019) the hottest stat for football. xG basically calculates for a discrete number of positions the ratio of how many times a player has scored from that position and how many times players have shot from that position. Using Frequentism, people than equate…