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Contest Winners (21/03/2014 05:16)

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."

- Khalil Gibran

Last week I set you guys a small challenge, while I finished up Season 111's Match Analytics: To guess how important each attribute was for performance in a match, all else being equal. Of two otherwise-identical midfielders, would the one with higher tackling or higher speed perform better over the course of a season? Does an extra perception point on your attacker help him more or less in a game than an extra heading point? And do older players really perform better than younger ones with similar stats? To figure this out myself I ran a large multiple linear regression, to see how each of the 8 visible attributes and age contributed to performance for 5000 players. And I offered some prizes for those of you whose predictions most closely matched the results of the analysis.

I'll discuss the results in detail in a separate post, but in the meantime here are the contest winners. Congratulations!

Goalkeepers

The closest five guesses for goalkeeping stats were:

1. Rational

2. Elligen

3. Carrotcruncher

4. FlirtyBee

5. Belizio

Ratty correctly identified Keeping as being the only primary stat undervalued by the standard Q formula - it should actually be weighted closer to 45%. Passing and Stamina on the other hand had no identifiable effect on performance, while Age was significant at 20% - in other words if you have two similar goalkeepers, play the older one!

Defenders

The closest five guesses for defending stats were:

1. Elligen

2. Carrotcruncher

3. Wiggle

4. FlirtyBee

5. Mystz0r

Elligen was second closest for goalkeepers, but had the most accurate guess for defender performance. Defenders show a very balanced reliance on four main attributes - Tackling, Speed, Perception and Age, all at around 20% - with Passing and Heading making up most of the remainder.

Midfielders

The closest five guesses for midfield stats were:

1. Moshu

2. FlirtyBee

3. Elligen

4. Carrotcruncher

5. Getzome

Most people got pretty close with midfielders, who need to be flexible - every attribute except Keeping contributed in some way to performance. Moshu was nearest, mainly because he rated Passing quite highly. Despite the fact that lots of attributes help midfielder performance, Passing (32%) is still the most crucial one, closely followed by Speed (26%), both of which most people underrated. Perception is quite important but at 11% was actually overrated by most people, as were Shooting and Tackling. Age was worth about 10%.

Attackers

The closest five guesses for attacking stats were:

1. Mr Uttisrud

2. FlirtyBee

3. Truthseeker

4. Wiggle

5. Rational

This is the one that tripped most people up - myself included - and revealed the most interesting results. Mr Uttisrud got closest out of everybody, and wins the credits. I'll go into the details in the next blog post, but for now just note that almost everyone had Shooting as the most important attribute, except for Mystz0r who rated Speed higher. Guess what? Shooting's not even in the top three.

And nor is Speed.

Overall

Here's the overall euclidean distance between everyone's guesses and the results of the regression, rounded to 2 decimal places. Distance in brackets, smaller is better! FlirtyBee didn't get any of the individual prizes, but finished in the top four for each - and wins the prize for Closest Overall. Kudos also to Carrotcruncher who ranked 2nd, 3rd and 4th for Defenders, Goalkeepers and Midfielders.

1. FlirtyBee (0.47)

2. Rational (0.49)

3. Carrotcruncher (0.49)

4. Elligen (0.55)

5. Wiggle (0.55)

6. Belizio (0.59)

7. Mystz0r (0.61)

8. Getzome (0.61)

9. Mr Uttisrud (0.61)

10. Moshu (0.68)

11. Spinner (0.69)

12. TruthSeeker (0.69)

Overall you can see that everyone's idea of what attributes are important was at least as accurate as the standard Q formulae (Spinner in the table above), and most were a big improvement. In other words, in broad terms the results of the analysis match up to what experienced players have intuited from playing the game. But there are some very interesting differences, which I'll go into in the next post...

- Belizio

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