Odd Lots · Thursday, July 16, 2026
The podcast addresses how soccer analytics models handle unpredictable elements like refereeing decisions and unusual game states. Experts explain that these uncontrollable factors are often 'censored' or excluded from data sets to focus on a more consistent game state, allowing for more reliable predictive modeling.
“I think it's control the controllables. That's a fixed parameter within the game. Is that uncertainty that you can't control and it's hard to predict. There is human error, obviously, and it's impossible to isolate when that's going to happen in a match, and how it will you just sort of play the game.”
“You also don't look at individual events per city. You might from an analysis perspective, but if you're building a basic predictive model for football outcomes, you might just take all the scoreboard results from the last ten years and then all those things cancel out.”
“When something like that happens, when you have an irregular game state, it is wise to sort of manipulate your data and remove that to give you a full picture of what does this game look like at an equal game state.”