S5M1: Impossibiliback with a 4 Year Retrospective Analysis Bang

Well hello there good folks of Impossibililand.

It's not been so long since I last sat down to type a blog post, which is in part because of the truncated close season, and mainly due to my late completion of the FA Cup stuff. Even so, how's your break been? Go anywhere nice? A little jaunt to SouthEast Asia perhaps, or maybe 2 weeks touring thr Antipodes. The old Coast-Coast US road trip's also been popular this summer. The old Amsterdam tournament seems to have been a victim of these far-flung commercial trips.

And new shiny toys? Man Utd and Liverpool fans certainly have a few to marvel at before eventually discarding when the next sale starts at Players R'Us. Us Gooners are pretty happy with our recycled gift from West London, who is currently going at a trophy a game. Obviously to maintain this record, we can't use him in the league until lifting-the-trophy-day which is a minor issue, but I'm sure Arsene Knows. Spurs have bought some defenders and now Poch will get the sack for not following the Blanchflower ideology of glorious failure. Southampton have continued their (successful) policy of going Dutch and will be looking at improving on last season's cracking effort. In East Landan, a crazy Croat cult hero will be looking to end the tenure at Upton Park with a bang (trying hard not to crowbar a bubble burst joke in here....).

Leicester City have lost a manager and a midfield leader, and Palaca have pulled off some blinding signings, including Cabaye. The newbies - well....I reckon they're gonna struggle from the off. No signings I've seen there to get the pulse racing. Finally, Newcastle fans have got their wish and had a few great signings. Now they just need "Schteve" to turn into "Wayey Steve" and they'll be sorted.

That's enough previewing, 'cos I now want to turn to the past. I've sat down over the summer with all the databases from each of the last 4 seasons to see if we can see a few things. The first thing to say is that there are minor gaps in the S3 database so these numbers are subject to change if I ever go back through the individual blog comments. The second thing is to say that the "Historical Leaderboard", "FA Cup Game" & "Historical Stats" tabs at the top of the page are now up-to-date, so have a look there. Now to the meat of the matter...

So, looking back at the last 4 years:

In total, 59 people have played Impossibilitee since inception
S1: 34 people - S2: 35 people - S3: 34 people - S4: 26 people

The average score over 4 seasons is 4.66 as a season average
S1: 4.69 - S2: 4.28 - S3: 4.97 - S4: 4.70

The highest weekly score is 10 (Fink Tank, EuroClubIndex - same matchday in S3).
The lowest weekly score is 0 (Will O'Doherty S1 & David Silverman S4)

The best scoring week was S3M30 (7.23 average) and the worst was S4M20 (2.79).

Now to look at who's played - I thought I'd divide it by Club supported...

So ~1/3 of players are Arsenal fans (likely driven by family), whilst Man Utd & Spurs feature highly too. The Unknowns are the random people who've come once or twice but are uncontactable to find out now. Neutral is the statistical models (ECI, WSC & FT).

So which segment predicts the best?

So over 4 years of data (ie, increasing the power of the study), the statistical models predict better than any human players. Interestingly, PNE (or Mark Lawrenson) is also ranked pretty highly. He does get a lot of unfair stick, but this is most likely driven by his nonsense chat to justify his scores - the predictions themselves aren't too bad.

Man Utd fans win their first silverware since the Moyes era by being the best of the rest. Stan Collymore (Villa) also ranks highly. Though it pains me to say it, Chelsea are next best, followed by the statistical anomaly that is our lone Watford fan. At least Arsenal are better than the delusional Scousers, and St Totteringham is alive and well in Impossibililand.

Looking at a week-by-week analysis, we can see that S3 was a high point in weekly participation, and also marginally improved average scores. However, it's fair to say that there's no real progress year on year. Sort it out guys, we're not learning!

Actually, having reflected on that in the time it took to press return twice, that's clearly not true. S3 + S4 are much improved on S1 + S2. More data needed. 

The final leaderboards are up-to-date on the tabs, but looking at leaderboard range (from winner to lowest scorer on final leaderboard) , we could argue that Impossibilitee is a microcosm of football and society in general...the gap keeps widening

S1: 0.99 - S2: 1.2 - S3: 1.15 - S4: 1.23

So now we come to the big one...who is the best predictor? If we go by Silverware, it has to be Josh Gaon with 2 FA Cups and a League title to his name. However, I've not included FA Cup games in this analysis so going by league, I've created the following 3 tables:

Best of the Rest:

This table contains anyone who has played in an infrequent/ad hoc fashion or has only played one season so not enough data exists to give an idea of form/overall quality. Couple of name changes in this piece - Joe Abbott has become YO to avoid confusion with Jonny Ainley - you can find your own name. Similar, all the DD and DW have been rebranded. Don't know who RG, BEN and DANIEL are. LG, CTW, MPN87 and KM are all with Ryan Wain I believe - please pass this on if you know who these relate to!

Column 2 is Games played.

Bobby C is of course our guest star Sir Bobby Charlton (gent). SC is Stan Collymore and MK is Martin Keown - both of whom have been dropped from the game for inconsistent predictions (often incomplete games weeks).

Now to Table 2: Those who play regular over the last 4 years, but not enough to qualify for the leaderboard under standard rules (>2/3 available weeks)

So the first thing to comment on here is that of the consistent players, the Fink Tank is the highest scoring. In due course, this will likely become the dominant prediction model. The second thing to mention is that this is roughly split down the middle. Josh Gaon and above fit nicely into the upper half of the next leaderboard, so could shake things up if they play regularly (and continue current scoring) next year. The lower half are a little more disparate. Most of these guys have missed a full season, so are disadvantaged by the application of the same rule to create the final table...

THE 4 YEAR IMPOSSIBILITEE TABLE - for those who have played >2/3 games over a 4 years period 

So, as could be predicted by the information above, the modellers (and Lawro) do very well. EuroClubIndex is the best predictor by a significant amount. The best human predictor is Sam Ruback - who has notoriously low odds on a regular basis. It's almost like slow and steady wins the race or some other fable.

Special mention to the commitment from Sam & Josh Daniels. As a final note, I know that 38 x 4 is 152. 4 game weeks in 4 years have been dropped due to not enough fixtures being played as to not distort the season averages. I know this is controversial, I know some disagree with this policy. Too bad. That's how it is for now.

As a special treat, I've also produced a confusing graph showing the season-by-season trends for all players who have played in all 4 seasons:

ECI's standout S3 gives it the commanding lead, whilst JT pretty much threw his toys out the pram at the beginning of S4, which is a shame as regression to the mean would likely have come in to play, bringing his green line up somewhere to the middle.

I'm also going to work on a couple of Impossibilialternate universes during the season, to see how results would differ with some other scoring systems. We'll leave all that for an international break.

So, to this week's predictions:

Man Utd vs Spurs - MAN UTD

Bournemouth vs Aston Villa - BOURNEMOUTH

Everton vs Watford - EVERTON

Leicester vs Sunderland - SUNDERLAND

Norwich vs Crystal Palace - CRYSTAL PALACE

Chelsea vs Swansea - CHELSEA

Arsenal vs West Ham - ARSENAL

Newcastle vs Southampton - DRAW

Stoke vs Liverpool - LIVERPOOL

WBA vs Man City - MAN CITY

Total odds: 1362/1 (Paddypower)

It's good to be back folks. Good luck for the season. To old friends, please join again, it'd be a pleasure to have you back and competing. And if anyone has a friend, colleague, relative etc who would be interested to play, then please...the more the merrier. The rules are in a tab at the top - direct them thatta way.

It's back. Let's make this the highest scoring season yet!