Nils Mackay

Champions League update!

🔹 Arsenal still on top! PSG joins the fight for first after an away win at Barca.
🔹 Qarabağ with 2 wins! Now 75% likely to make the next round.

🔸 Both Dutch teams in bottom 6 teams — heading towards elimination.
🔸 Athletic Club with 2 losses heading towards an early exit.

Had a chat with @sport.nos.nl about the dire start of the European season for the Netherlands, and how it affects their chances of maintaining 6th on the UEFA Coefficients ranking.

Battle for Top 10, good for direct UCL ticket:
78% —🇹🇷 Turkey (-12%)
60% —🇵🇱 Poland (+5%)
36% —🇨🇿 Czechia (-1%)
26% —🇬🇷 Greece (+8%)

Battle for Top 15, good for 1 extra European ticket:
51% — 🇨🇾Cyprus (+18%)
37% —🇦🇹Austria (-13%)
8% —🇨🇭Switzerland (-7%)
5% —🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland (-2%)

🇩🇪 Germany climbing up the ranks of the yearly Coefficients ranking — good for a bonus Champions League ticket.

Two wins this week sees them rise from 5th to 3rd most likely to grab a ticket. England and Italy still favourites.

Here's the consequences for 🇳🇱 the Netherlands after 5 losses in 5 games.

🔹 From 80% of 6th down to almost 50%.
🔹 Even chances of dropping below Belgium, up from <0.1% to now 1.7%.

All that while the Netherlands still have 6/6 teams, while Portugal have lost 1 and Belgium already lost 2!

Congrats Sam!

Probably not France, but definitely for Portugal and the Netherlands. Dependent on how this season goes, they might start the season in 6th even!

Clearly putting more effort into the offensive run!!

That said, a 6 point gap is not nothing. Things will have to go quite bad for Germany and vice versa for France to make this a reality.

Still, it's the closest a country has been to breaking into Top 4 since 2014. Last year the gap was 13 points, and ±20 points the years prior.

New year, new coefficients simulation!

⚠️This year is the first time I've seen where the Big 4 might actually be challenged, as 🇫🇷 France _could_ overtake 🇩🇪 Germany.

Being Top 4 gives you 4 direct UCL spots, which are now at risk for Germany, after some poor seasons in Europe.

That's fair. Truth is the model does a simulation and there's some noise involved, and especially with very low numbers like Marseille ending 1st this can lead to some weird looking results. The 0.2% ending 1st for them is likely a fluke of this specific simulation.

Finally, here's our Conference League predictions.

Again an English team favourites to win the League Stage — just like Chelsea was last year.

Top 24 achievable for all, even lowest rated teams Shelbourne/Aberdeen with a ±20% chance!

In the Europa League, English teams are once again favoured to make an impression.

Here's how we estimate each teams' likelihood of Top 8 and Top 24 in the League Stage.

A new #ChampionsLeague season is upon us! Here's each team's likelihood of qualifying for Top 8 or 24, according to our predictions:

First place is lava!

Nice writeup! Any reason you didn't go with actual game results (instead of simulated ones) for the final test?

An experimental analysis of possession state value models: part 3 Conceptually, possession value approaches such as VAEP, PV, OBV, and g+ are all identical: they estimate the chances of scoring (and…

🚨The third and final blog post in our series on possession value models design decisions🔍: Can the features chosen to represent the game state inadvertently bias player ratings? w/
@probberechts.bsky.social @jessejdavis.bsky.social Lode Van Tente

dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/sports/blog/...

I love using em dashes (—) whenever I write something, but now it seems people will just think I'm using an LLM. 💀

Yes, then 6 Spanish teams will be in UCL next year.

I never realized it can be used in two different ways and now I will forever doubt if I'm using it correctly, thanks John.

Not many changes on the coefficients table:
🇳🇴 Bodo/Glimt win means Norway overtakes Greece

🇵🇱 Both Polish teams lose, and 🇦🇹 Rapid Wien with a win, which means places 13-15 look mostly set.

🇸🇪 Djurgården lose and thus Sweden less like to overtake Croatia or Cyprus.

After Lazio's 2-0 loss last night, the battle for the Champions League bonus ticket is just about over.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England's #5 is guaranteed a CL ticket
🇪🇸 Spain's #5 is 99.8% sure

For 🇩🇪 and 🇮🇹 having 8 teams didn't help, but in the end they also didn't perform at the level needed.

Yeah that's a pain for sure haha. Good luck!

Yeah that looks about right. With AH you have to take into account both the probability and the spread of the given AH odds, if you're not doing that already.

From the goal line you can find the poisson rate which matches the over/under. That gives the total goals expectation. From the AH odds you can do a similar thing, dividing the total goals in a way which matches the AH spread and odds. Both can be found e.g. with scipy.optimize.

[NEW] First blog in a long time!

In which I show a pretty straightforward way to derive teams' attacking and defensive strengths from bookmaker odds.

This method is not only easy to implement, but also very accurate compared to results-based models.

mackayanalytics.nl/2025/04/01/g...

[NEW] First blog in a long time!

In which I show a pretty straightforward way to derive teams' attacking and defensive strengths from bookmaker odds.

This method is not only easy to implement, but also very accurate compared to results-based models.

mackayanalytics.nl/2025/04/01/g...

I've been catfishing you all for too long — I've actually been bald for quite some years now so figured it was time to update my profile picture accordingly as well...

Data Analyst Overview: Stats Perform is the market leader in  sports tech. We provide the richest and most trusted sports data available and are at the forefront of the latest advancements in AI and machine learni...

We're expanding our team of Data Analysts so if you want to work for Opta and create new visualisations, dive into the data to find insights for clients and chat about sport all day, apply here. We're open to remote workers to get the best candidates.

eobe.fa.em2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

⚽ New blog post - which football prediction model is the best?

Poisson, Weibull, or Negative Binomial — each has its strengths and weaknesses. Learn how to optimise them for accurate match predictions using my penaltyblog Python package.

pena.lt/y/2025/03/10...

#FootballAnalytics #DataScience