{"id":232261,"date":"2026-02-28T02:14:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T08:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/putting-sports-stats-to-the-test-unpredictable-play-helps-pick-a-winner-in-soccer"},"modified":"2026-02-28T02:14:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T08:14:55","slug":"putting-sports-stats-to-the-test-unpredictable-play-helps-pick-a-winner-in-soccer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/putting-sports-stats-to-the-test-unpredictable-play-helps-pick-a-winner-in-soccer","title":{"rendered":"Putting sports stats to the test: Unpredictable play helps pick a winner in soccer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/putting-sports-stats-to-the-test-unpredictable-play-helps-pick-a-winner-in-soccer2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A comprehensive game plan and strategic tactics are critical to winning soccer, but how much does a team\u2019s unpredictability in moving the soccer ball around the pitch matter? In a new article published in <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosone\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pone.0326800\" target=\"_blank\"><i>PLOS One<\/i><\/a>, an international team of researchers analyzed event data from top-tier association soccer competitions to provide insights into match analysis, player tactics and game strategy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSoccer is low-scoring, so a couple of moments can swing a match, and simple statistics like possession or shot counts do not always capture who performed better. Our approach measures how unpredictably and widely a team moves the ball across a match,\u201d says Dr. Sergiy Shelyag, Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics and Data Science at Flinders University.<\/p>\n<p>We found that \u2018all zones count\u2019 metric, the one that values every region of the field equally, including rarely used areas, aligns best with winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A comprehensive game plan and strategic tactics are critical to winning soccer, but how much does a team\u2019s unpredictability in moving the soccer ball around the pitch matter? In a new article published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed event data from top-tier association soccer competitions to provide insights into match analysis, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1509],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}