Do the Tournament's Best Performers Always Win The UEFA European Championship?

Short tournaments,especially ones with a knockout phase are more likely to be won by one of the lesser lights.Over the 38 games of an English Premier League season team talent will tend to overcome the randomness of chance and the crown will go to that year's most outstanding side.Defeats are part of almost every Championship winning team's season and unlike the FA Cup or the elimination phase of a major club or country competition,a defeat does not prove terminal to a club's title ambitions.The spread of FA Cup winners is wider than the distribution of EPL winners over the duration of the latter and the impact of random chance is well illustrated in the more generous odds offered on the best sides winning a cup compared to a league.

Manchester City are currently being offered at around a 40% chance to retain the Premiership Championship compared to just under a 20% chance to regain the FA Cup.So the phenomenon is well established.Those betting on tournament outsiders in such competitions as the Euros will find that the odds on offer,while appearing generous will be shorter than expected to account for the extra chances that the truncated format affords such nations.Favourite followers will appear to be getting more generous odds,but may have failed to factor in the role of chance.A team can lose a game in the group phase of the Euros,but still go onto lift the trophy by avoiding defeat in the three or in the case of Denmark in 1992,two knockout games.By contrast a team can be perfect in the group stages and be eliminated in the knockout rounds despite remaining unbeaten in open play.Such a fate felled the Dutch in 2000 and the spoils went to France,a team Holland had already defeated in a Group D match.

The Euro format gives the opportunity to mid and lower ranked teams to succeed by producing a short term run of unlikely outcomes.But fortune can also play a role in allowing any team to overcome relatively poor performances in the more forgiving early group games.France may be Euro 2000 victors in the record books,but did Holland produce that tournament's overall best results?

Since 1996 16 teams have taken part in the finals,so with three group games and three further knockout matches,even the finalists can only play about a third of the available teams.Half of the competing countries are eliminated at the group stages and they will play against just three opponents.Therefore the problem of evaluating each countries performance at the finals becomes an issue of incomplete head to head records,leading to variable strength of schedules.In a normal league format,once the number of games played by a group of teams exceeds the number of teams taking part,it becomes inevitable that inter connecting formlines will exist for each team.In tournament play these formlines usually come about during the knockout phase.

For example in Euro 2000,Spain who won Group C didn't actually play against Denmark who propped up Group D,but they did play and lose to France in the quarter finals.France did play Denmark in the group stages,therefore there is a collateral line of form linking Spain to Denmark that goes through France.For the current Euro Championship format,this type of problem can be broken down into the solution of 16 simultaneous equations,one for each team,where the answer is a performance related indicator such as tournament goal difference and the components of the equation comprises the teams that each side played against.The subsequent ratings are sometimes referred to as Power Ratings.

In short,a rating for each team is derived that best describes the actual results that were achieved over all the tournament matches and the higher a team's rating,then the better that team performed over the duration of the competition.

There's little doubt for example that Greece weren't the best side in Europe in 2004,they went into the competition as the lowest FIFA ranked side.But putting aside their unlikely run of narrow victories,did the results they actually achieved over 22 days in Portugal entitle them to win the tournament.Or did their rating suffer from such things as group game defeats and progression in the later knockout stages via penalty shootouts rather than victories,enabling them to lift the trophy more through their results appearing in a fortuitous pattern rather than through consistently good results .

To try to answer this question,below I've tabulated the post tournament ratings expressed as goals derived from games played by the sides at the last five Euro Championships and compared them to the stage of the tournament when each team was eliminated.The very small game sample size means that the ratings aren't designed to be predictive,but they may add context to their descriptive value by correcting for the varying strengths of opponents faced by each side.

Euro 2008.

TEAM.	Elimination Stage.	Power Rating.
Spain	WINNERS	3.71
Netherlands	Quarters	2.71
Germany	Beaten Finalists	2.68
Croatia	Quarters	2.58
Russia	Semis	2.56
Sweden	Group(3rd)	2.24
Portugal	Quarters	2.15
Turkey	Semis	1.89
Switzerland	Group(4th)	1.77
Italy	Quarters	1.53
Austria	Group(3rd)	1.51
Greece	Group(4th)	1.50
Czech Republic	Group(3rd)	1.27
Poland	Group(4th)	1.26
Romania	Group(3rd)	0.74
France	Group(4th)	0

Spain,the current holders were worthy winners four years ago.They won all their matches in the group stage,needed penalties to progress from the quarters,but won the next two games within the ninety minutes.An unbeaten,almost perfect showing overall and their tournament rating was well in excess of any other team in the competition.A clutch of four similarly rated teams trailed Spain and all made the knockout stages,while the highest rated team not to emerge from a group was Sweden who picked up three points and two narrow defeats against the eventual winners and one semi finalist in Russia.

Euro 2004.

TEAM.	Elimination Stage.	Power Rating.
Greece	WINNERS.	5.44
Portugal	Beaten Finalists	5.34
Spain	Group(3rd)	5.12
England	Quarters	5.06
France	Quarters	4.68
Czech Republic	Semis	4.62
Russia	Group(4th)	4.62
Netherlands	Semis	4.12
Germany	Group(3rd)	3.51
Croatia	Group(3rd)	3.50
Sweden	Quarters	3.42
Latvia	Group(4th)	2.76
Switzerland	Group(4th)	2.75
Denmark	Quarters	2.34
Italy	Group(3rd)	2.25
Bulgaria	Group(4th)	0

Greece may have defied the odds to lift the trophy by producing a clutch of less than likely victories,but their results during the tournament made them worthy winners.They beat Portugal twice and unlike their fellow finalists they didn't need penalties to progress in any of the knockout games.The subsequent strong showing from the two qualifiers from Group A helped to lift the rating of non qualifiers Spain and Russia.Denmark made the quarters,but recorded a relatively low rating by virtue of a matchup with Bulgaria,the tournament's weakest side,a comprehensive defeat in the knockout stages and fellow qualifiers,Sweden's failure to progess past the first elimination stage.

Euro 2000.

TEAM	Elimination Stage.	Power Rating.
Netherlands	Semis	3.74
France	WINNERS	3.13
Italy	Beaten Finalists	2.70
Portugal	Semis	2.60
Czech Republic	Group(3rd)	2.44
Turkey	Quarters	1.50
Romania	Quarters	1.14
England	Group(3rd)	1.00
Sweden	Group(4th)	0.98
Spain	Quarters	0.88
Belgium	Group(3rd)	0.73
Denmark	Group(4th)	0.44
Norway	Group(3rd)	0.31
Germany	Group(4th)	0.25
Slovenia	Group(4th)	0.06
Yugoslavia	Quarters	0

The first occasion when the results of the outright winners weren't of sufficient quality to make them also the tournament's highest ranked side.France lifted the trophy,but Holland beat them and two other opponents in the group games,were then imperious in defeating Yugoslavia before falling,undefeated in open play to a shootout defeat by Italy in the semi finals.The six goal thrashing of Yugoslavia doesn't skew the Dutch rating because it also depresses their strength of schedule.Yugoslavia made the knockout stages,but finished as the tournament's lowest power rated side.They sneaked into second spot in a weak Group C with just one win and the extra second phase game merely afforded them the opportunity to record a second loss.Retrospectively,the Czech Republic's paltry three points and zero goal difference was more impressive than if taken at face value as it was achieved against the tournament's top two sides.

Euro 1996.

TEAM	Elimination Stage.	Power Rating.
Germany	WINNERS	3.39
England	Semis	3.20
France	Semis	2.55
Spain	Quarters	2.43
Italy	Group(3rd)	2.38
Czech Republic	Beaten Finalists	2.36
Portugal	Quarters	2.07
Netherlands	Quarters	1.98
Scotland	Group(3rd)	1.84
Bulgaria	Group(3rd)	1.74
Croatia	Quarters	1.68
Russia	Group(4th)	1.38
Switzerland	Group(4th)	1.34
Denmark	Group(3rd)	1.25
Romania	Group(4th)	1.24
Turkey	Group(4th)	0

A routine tournament where the majority of the teams progressed as far as they were entitled to given their results.England were a shade behind outright winners and top rated side,Germany,but some of that rating was a result of home field advantage.Beaten finalists,the Czech Republic were partly out of line because they had the good fortune to record one of their losses in the group games and then emerged from a shootout in the semi finals.

Euro 1992.

TEAM	Elimination Stage.	Power Rating.
Netherlands	Semis	1.49
Denmark	WINNERS	1.41
Sweden	Semis	1.20
England	Group(4th)	0.81
France	Group(3rd)	0.81
Germany	Beaten Finalists	0.77
Scotland	Group(3rd)	0.75
CIS	Group(4th)	0

The last European Championship Finals to feature just eight sides.Chaos reigned throughout.Denmark belatedly replaced Yugoslavia who were subject to UN sanctions and ended up winners,if not the top rated side and USSR qualified,but took part under the banner of the Commonwealth of Independent States.Germany qualified as runners up in Group B,narrowly from Scotland,but added one win and one defeat to that record and ended up rated only sixth best in the tournament.As in 2000,the Netherlands were the top rated side who were again unbeaten in open play and eliminated at the semi finals stage on penalties.

Expected Points Graphs for the Opening Nine Days of Euro 2012.

Scorers.
17',Lewandowski,1-0
44',Red Card,Papastathopoulos,(Greece).
51',Salpingidis,1-1
69,Red Card,Szczesny,(Poland)+Penalty.
71,Penalty Missed.

The most incident packed game of the opening round as Poland threw away virtually every advantage known to football.Namely,home field advantage,the first goal and an initial red card shown to their opponents.Poland were pre game favourites,mostly because of the venue,but they stretched their advantage with a goal after 17'.

Papastathopoulos' barely believable red card then left Greece in a hole from which few teams would have recovered.Yet 25 playing minutes later they were briefly a team who would expect to take an average of 2 points per game longterm.That position of Greek strength only lasted for less than a second of actual playing time,as the expected benefits from Szczesny's red card and penalty wasn't fully realised when Karagounis' penalty was saved by Tyton.
..............................................................................................................................

Scorers.
15',Gzagoev,1-0
24',Shirokov,2-0
52',Pilar,2-1
79',Gzagoev,3-1
82',Pavlyuchenko,4-1

A fairly routine win for Russia.Czech Republic briefly threaten to be competitive when they halved Russia's lead of 52' minutes,but they were still the inferior side trailing with time running out and it was Russia who added to the scoreline.
.................................................................................................................................

Scorer.
24',Krohn-Dehli,0-1.

The Dutch were strong pre game favourites,but still lost that position when the Danes scored an early opening goal and despite many chances Holland's likelihood of points slowed ebbed away.
................................................................................................................................

Scorer.
72'Gomez,1-0

A fairly dull affair where Portugal's defensive approach succeeded just long enough to hand the Germans a massive advantage with precious little time for an equaliser.
...........................................................................................................................

Scorers.
61',0-1,Natale.
63',1-1,Fabregas.

Another fairly dull graph.The relative lateness of underdog Italy's opening goal also put them in a strong match position,but Fabregas' reply was almost instant and both team's Expected Points meandered gently towards 1 at fulltime.
...............................................................................................................................

Scorers.
3',1-0,Mandzukic
19',1-1,St Ledger
43',2-1,Jelavic
48',3-1,Mandzukic

An exciting first half as the Republic showed lots of fight to stay competitive with the pre game favourites.But Jelavic's pre half time go ahead goal from an Irish assist confirmed the superiority Croatia had gained following their opening goal and the second half petered out into a routine win for the better side.
..................................................................................................................................

Scorers.
31',Lescott,0-1
39',Nasri,1-1

A similar profile to the Italy Spain game with one goal apiece arriving in quick succession.Many were split on who to make pre game favourites and I went with the patriotic option.
..................................................................................................................................

Scorers.
52',Ibrahimovic,0-1
55',Shevchenko,1-1
61',Shevchenko,2-1

A marvelous night for the co hosts and a burst of sustained excitement for the neutrals after a cagey start.Opening goals after the interval often lead to big shifts in expectation,but following on from the example set by Spain and France,Ukraine replied within minutes.Unlike the two previous champions,Shevchenko then pushed his side into a commanding position with a second and then watched on as the hosts rode their luck and the expectation curve all the way to 3 points.

...........................................................................................................................

Scorers.
3',Jiracek,0-1
6',Pilar,0-2
53',Gekas,1-2

.................................................................................................................................

Scorers.
37',Dzagoev,0-1
57',Blaszczykowski,1-1

.................................................................................................................................

Scorers.
24',0-1,Pepe
36',0-2,Postiga
41',1-2,Bendtner
81',2-2,Bendtner
87',2-3,Varela

.................................................................................................................................

Scorers.
24',0-1,Gomez
38',0-2,Gomez
72',1-2,van Persie

...............................................................................................................................

Scorers.
39',0-1,Pirlo
72',1-1,Mandzukic

...........................................................................................................................

Scorers.
4',1-0,Torres
49',2-0,Silva
71',3-0,Torres
83',4-0,Fabregas

...............................................................................................................................

Scorers,
53',0-1,Menez
56',0-2,Cabaye

...........................................................................................................................

Scorers.
23',0-1,Carroll
49',1-1,Johnson(og)
59',2-1,Mellberg
64',2-2,Walcott
78',2-3,Welbeck

.........................................................................................................................

Scorer.
72',1-0,Jiracek.

.............................................................................................................................

Scorer.
45',1-0,Karagounis.

...........................................................................................................................

Scorers.
11',0-1,v.d. Vaart
28',1-1,Ronaldo
74',2-1,Ronaldo

Playing The Percentages.

Chris Anderson pens one of the top three US based soccer blogs at Soccer by the Numbers and on his Twitter feed this week he links to a Prozone Analysis of penalty shootouts from The Leaders in Performance website.No one claims authorship of the article Chris mentions,but it leans heavily on Prozone data and it looks at the statistical side of penalty shootouts,concentrating on conversion rates for types of shots and also the order in which the penalties were taken.I'd already read the post before Chris flagged it up on his Twitter feed and I was mildly unimpressed at first sight and even more so having re read the article.The link has also received a few skeptical queries from a few of Chris' followers.

The article is actually a very interesting read.It is jam packed with insight into the favoured technique of right and left footed players,the distribution of shots over the area of the goal and even delves into a shooter's run up.Great descriptive stuff.But it concludes with a fair number of headline grabbing conclusions by leaning almost exclusively on the use of percentages.

Any sporting stats piece is going to contain figures expressed as a percentage because it is a useful way to give a scaled estimation of something that you are measuring.However,when used in isolation of the raw figures,a percentage can be extremely misleading.Imagine a team that has taken 75% of it's available points.On the face of it the 75% figure appears extremely impressive,but unless we also know the number of events involved our confidence in the value of this percentage figure is unknown.

If we are talking about a team taking 75% of their available points over a whole season,then we know that we are almost certainly looking at a top two side.By contrast if the range is just 4 games then we could be describing any one of the following teams from the 2011/12 season.Arsenal,Manchester City or United Spurs,Chelsea,Fulham,Norwich,Newcastle,Swansea,WBA,Sunderland or Wigan.So by adding for example,the trivial information that we are actually describing teams taking 9 points from 12 rather than 85 from 114 we add immensely to the value and context of our statement.

The Leaders in Performance post mentions that they have taken data from penalty shootouts from every Euro and World Cup since 1998,but from then on they use percentages all the way starting with the reveal that 75% of teams who take the first kick go onto win the shootout.As in the previous example concerning percentage of league points gained by a team,the 75% figure initially impresses,but it is all but meaningless unless we also know how many shootouts we are taking about.The article does include enough details for the reader to discover the answer.Since 1998 there have been 16 Euro and World Cup shootouts,so the 75% figure is obtained from a 12 from 16 success rate for teams taking the first penalty and if those figures were presented along with the percentages we would have been in a much stronger position to judge the strength of the conclusion.

Better still a table listing the sixteen shootout decided games in the study would have enabled a reader to see if any of the teams kicking second may have been affected by factors other than a possible pressure to keep up.Indeed in the case of two teams kicking second in the sample,or more accurately the same country twice,a recognised penalty taker from that country was red carded during the match.That made him unavailable for the shootout,possibly compromised fitness levels of his teammates and may have altered substitution policy.Beckham and Rooney verses Argentina and Portugal respectively for those who haven't guessed the identities.12.5% or 2 from 16 of your sample events were probably atypical of normal penalty kick contests.

The post goes on in similar percentage based terms.The goal is divided into 9 sectors and 18.7% of successful kicks are apparently shot low and left to the corner.Even if you've taken the time to find out that the 16 shootouts contained 147 kicks,how do you even begin to make sense of the 18.2% figure.

Possibly the most flawed conclusion in the piece is the one that seems to most impress the writer.A "paltry" 14.2% of penalties are scored when a miss means immediate elimination,crumbling under pressure writ large.Again we're left to guess the sample size.14.2% reeks heavily of one score from seven and if indeed that is the actual numbers used for the post,we can start to judge if 14% is likely be an accurate longterm estimate for the success rate of such kicks under those specific circumstance,or whether we are looking at small sample size variation.Put plainly,how likely are penalty conversion rates to fall from 70%+ for regular takers to 60%+ in shootouts to a paltry 14% for " miss and your team is eliminated" attempts in much larger sample runs.

Shootouts themselves are rare events,they only happen in a knockout phase of a competition.Even rarer within shootouts are contests that extend well beyond the initial ten penalty kicks.The first shootout I witnessed live was at Stoke's Victoria Ground on a Wednesday evening in what was probably still called the League Cup.Manchester City beat the Potters after a shootout that had involved all ten outfielders from both teams.Hardly anyone missed and so the conversion rate for players taking the sudden death kick was 80%.Four successes and one failure,in this post's spirit of full disclosure.The last penalty contest I saw,on TV went two kicks longer than the Stoke/ManCity one from way back.Sheffield United and Huddersfield missed six of the first ten kicks,but then both teams were perfect until the luckless former Stoke keeper,Steve Simonsen missed with the game's 22nd spot kick.The paltry conversion rates of the 14% chokers would soon be transformed into clutch superheros if a few of these less likely events started to appear in small sized sample batches.

I've every sympathy with one man bloggers struggling to collect data to crunch,but a post on a site so dressed to impress as to call itself "Leaders in Performance" should be collecting beyond a sample size of 16.If they'd gone back another thirty years they could have doubled the Euro and World Cup sample size.They could include other national team competitions that are settled from the spot and top class club knockout games.Or they could have presented the piece as descriptive rather than a tool to predict future performance.

But most of all they should have added the raw numbers to the percentages.