Stuart Coles

Racism in Italian Football There's plenty of evidence of individual episodes of racism in Italian football stadiums: here, here, here, here.......

A Data Revolution Data is at the heart of everything we do at Smartodds. And increasingly, the analysis of relevant data is also an integral part of...

The Numbers Don't Lie A while back, during the World Cup, Paul W directed me to an article in the Athletic. It was published just before the...

Using Statistics to Enhance Sports Betting: A Football (Soccer) Perspective Sports betting has become increasingly popular in recent years, with...

Sticky Problem 1 Q: What's brown and sticky? Scroll down for answer: |||||||||| A: A stick. Ok, terrible. So how about this? Sticky Problem 2 If I...

The Opta Million I'm writing this post shortly before the start of the World Cup, for which Opta have posted the following competition: Entry to the...

Introduction Some followers of this blog will know that my own personal involvement with Smartodds stems from an academic paper I co-authored with...

Introduction I wish I could take credit for the title of this post, but I can't. It's the title of an article in The Economist that discusses the...

Introduction This is the first of two posts discussing an experiment that I invited Smartodds employees and associates to participate in. The whole...

All that Glitters is not gold   (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act II Scene 7) IBM has teamed up with Wimbledon for a number of...

Maybe I'm wrong and it's always been this way, but it seems to me that there's a trend for football journalists to make more use of statistics in...

Football, like all sports, has many 'old chestnuts' - beliefs about the game that have folklore status and are widely shared as being...