Tuesday 24 September 2013

Ranking Rabat Ajax

The Football Analyst lost his last bet of the weekend last night as Leyton Orient maintained their impressive 100% so the bottom of the FTL table now looks like this:
With a full slate of Conference games tonight, we may see Graeme dipping his feet in the currently icy waters again. 

There are also a full schedule of matches in Ligue 1, Serie A and La Liga so the XX Draws selections will be in action.

Emp, no doubt feeling rather happy right now, commented on my post on subjectivity / objectivity:
Couldn't agree more Cassini. If you wait till all is clear, there is no longer a price. I think the best opportunities are when other intelligent players feel that they don't want to be involved.
Two points to note:
a) If you were rating the lower league as well, there is no problem with promoted/relegated teams as you can have a seamless transition (unless of course 500M worth of incoming transfers off-season)
b) On transfers and things like that, I think it's just not possible to know precisely what impact new signings/departures/suspensions have, given that football is so team-oriented, that I don't know any particular way to predict whether loss of cohesion offsets improved quality, what the actual quality of transferred players is; etc. I am happy to defer to stats under most circumstances.
And another note, updated table? I have a sneaking suspicion I might have catapulted close to the lead.
The sneaking suspicion was correct. At one time, I did rate all the English teams down to the Level 6 Regional Conference Leagues, but replaced those with the top leagues in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. apart from taking a huge amount of time, the rankings are always from a season of games against lower division teams, and promoted teams usually make changes to prepare, and so in my opinion they would be of limited value, and certainly not worth the effort needed to maintain them. The Euro Club Index site ranks 714 teams, from Barcelona to Malta's Rabat Ajax (Barcelona being the top rated by the way).

Not a great weekend for John Walsh's NFL tips, with just two winners from nine selections:

1 comment:

emp said...

It does take a lot of effort of course, but I wasn't advocating rating lower leagues primarily for this smoother transition that I spoke of; that's just a side-benefit to the real point which is of course to bet on that lower league itself. Anyway, it's certainly not necessary or mandatory, and since you've actually done it I'll defer to your judgement on whether it's worth it.