A Checkpoint Of Spanish Football League

I am an absolute beginner, but I am absolutely sane (Absolute Beginners, David Bowie)

Some time ago I wrote this post, where I predicted correctly the winner of the Spanish Football League several months before its ending. After thinking intensely about taking the risk of ruining my reputation repeating the analysis, I said “no problem, Antonio, do it again: in the end you don’t have any reputation to keep”. So here we are.

From a technical point of view there are many differences between both analysis. Now I use webscraping to download data, dplyr and pipes to do transformations and interactive D3.js graphs to show results. I think my code is better now and it makes me happy.

As I did the other time, Bradley-Terry Model gives an indicator of  the power of each team, called ability, which provides a natural mechanism for ranking teams. This is the evolution of abilities of each team during the championship (last season was played during the past weekend):

liga1_ability2

Although it is a bit messy, the graph shows two main groups of teams: on the one hand, Barcelona, Atletico de Madrid, Real Madrid and Villareal; on the other hand, the rest. Let’s have a closer look to evolution of the abilities of the top 4 teams:

liga2_ability2

While Barcelona, Atletico de Madrid and Real Madrid walk in parallel,  Villareal seems to be a bit stacked in the last seasons; the gap between them and Real Madrid is increasing little by little. Maybe is the Zidane’s effect. It is quite interesting discovering what teams are increasing their abilities: they are Malaga, Eibar and Getafe. They will probably finish the championship in a better position than they have nowadays (Eibar could reach fifth position):

liga3_ability2

What about Villareal? Will they go up some position? I don’t think so. This plot shows the probability of winning any of the top 3:

liga4_villareal2

As you can see, probability is decreasing significantly. And what about Barcelona? Will win? It is a very difficult question. They are almost tied with Atletico de Madrid, and only 5 and 8 points above Real Madrid and Villareal. But it seems Barcelona keep them at bay. This plot shows the evolution of the probability of be beaten by Atletico, Real Madrid and Villareal:

liga5_Barcelona2

All probabilities are under 50% and decreasing (I supposed a scoring of 2-0 for Barcelona in the match against Sporting of season 16 that was postponed to next February 17th).

Data science is a profession for brave people so it is time to do some predictions. These are mine, ordered by likelihood:

  • Barcelona will win, followed by Atletico (2), Real Madrid (3), Villareal (4) and Eibar (5)
  • Malaga and Getafe will go up some positions
  • Next year I will do the analysis again

Here you have the code:

library(rvest)
library(stringr)
library(BradleyTerry2)
library(dplyr)
library(reshape)
library(rCharts)
nseasons=20
results=data.frame()
for (i in 1:nseasons)
{
  webpage=paste0("http://www.marca.com/estadisticas/futbol/primera/2015_16/jornada_",i,"/")
  html(webpage) %>%
    html_nodes("table") %>%
    .[[1]] %>%
    html_table(header=FALSE, fill=TRUE) %>%
    mutate(X4=i) %>%
    rbind(results)->results
}
colnames(results)=c("home", "score", "visiting", "season")
results %>% 
  mutate(home     = iconv(home,     from="UTF8",to="ASCII//TRANSLIT"),
         visiting = iconv(visiting, from="UTF8",to="ASCII//TRANSLIT")) %>%
  #filter(grepl("-", score)) %>%
  mutate(score=replace(score, score=="18:30 - 17/02/2016", "0-2")) %>% # resultado fake para el Barcelona
  mutate(score_home     = as.numeric(str_split_fixed(score, "-", 2)[,1])) %>%
  mutate(score_visiting = as.numeric(str_split_fixed(score, "-", 2)[,2])) %>%
  mutate(points_home     =ifelse(score_home > score_visiting, 3, ifelse(score_home < score_visiting, 0, 1))) %>%
  mutate(points_visiting =ifelse(score_home > score_visiting, 0, ifelse(score_home < score_visiting, 3, 1))) -> data
prob_BT=function(x, y) {exp(x-y) / (1 + exp(x-y))}
BTabilities=data.frame()
for (i in 13:nseasons)
{
  data %>% filter(season<=i) %>%
    BTm(cbind(points_home, points_visiting), home, visiting, data=.) -> footballBTModel
  BTabilities(footballBTModel) %>%
  as.data.frame()  -> tmp 
  cbind(tmp, as.character(rownames(tmp)), i) %>% 
  mutate(ability=round(ability, digits = 2)) %>%
  rbind(BTabilities) -> BTabilities
}
colnames(BTabilities)=c("ability", "s.e.", "team", "season")
sort(unique(BTabilities[,"team"])) -> teams
BTprobabilities=data.frame()
for (i in 13:nseasons)
{
  BTabilities[BTabilities$season==i,1] %>% outer( ., ., prob_BT) -> tmp
  colnames(tmp)=teams
  rownames(tmp)=teams  
  cbind(melt(tmp),i) %>% rbind(BTprobabilities) -> BTprobabilities
}
colnames(BTprobabilities)=c("team1", "team2", "probability", "season")
BTprobabilities %>% 
  filter(team1=="Villarreal") %>% 
  mutate(probability=round(probability, digits = 2)) %>%
  filter(team2 %in% c("R. Madrid", "Barcelona", "Atletico")) -> BTVillareal
BTprobabilities %>% 
  filter(team2=="Barcelona") %>% 
  mutate(probability=round(probability, digits = 2)) %>%
  filter(team1 %in% c("R. Madrid", "Villarreal", "Atletico")) -> BTBarcelona
AbilityPlot <- nPlot(
  ability ~ season, 
  data = BTabilities, 
  group = "team",
  type = "lineChart")
AbilityPlot$yAxis(axisLabel = "Estimated Ability", width = 62)
AbilityPlot$xAxis(axisLabel = "Season")
VillarealPlot <- nPlot(
  probability ~ season, 
  data = BTVillareal, 
  group = "team2",
  type = "lineChart")
VillarealPlot$yAxis(axisLabel = "Probability of beating", width = 62)
VillarealPlot$xAxis(axisLabel = "Season")
BarcelonaPlot <- nPlot(
  probability ~ season, 
  data = BTBarcelona, 
  group = "team1",
  type = "lineChart")
BarcelonaPlot$yAxis(axisLabel = "Probability of being beaten", width = 62)
BarcelonaPlot$xAxis(axisLabel = "Season")

8 thoughts on “A Checkpoint Of Spanish Football League

  1. Hi Antonio, this is fantastic.

    I’ve replicated your code for Turkish Premier League, And the result is
    1-Fenerbahce
    2-Besiktas
    3-Galatasaray

    I’ve also tested for last season, prediction says Fenerbahce but unfortunately Galatasaray won the title.

    lets wait and see.

    King regards,
    Selcuk

  2. Nice analysis.
    One comment though, don’t you think it is confusing to name the gamedays as seasons (see you x axis)?

    1. It is an operator of magrittr package which is also included in dplyr package. Left side enters as input of the right side. It makes code simpler to understand

  3. Hey! That’s a great job you did. However, excuse me if I’m being any harsh, but your code is pretty hard to read. I realise that you don’t have to make it so, but spacings and comments on what you are doing in your code would help a real lot. Since that is a public post.

    I’m just trying to replicate your work and find myself struggling to understand what’s going on at times. So, something I wanted to pinpoint. Otherwise than that, great job!

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