Jordan better than Ball? I Fink notUpdated: July 26th, 2007
Oh dear, oh dear.
I’ve been impressed with the football coverage in The Times this season, but they’ve gone and dropped a right bollock today.
Resident statistician Daniel Finkelstein employed academics Dr Ian Graham and Dr Henry Stott to rank all of last season’s Premiership players. They opted for a multivariate Poisson log-normal model to “identify the relationship between goals scored and every kick of the ball made by every player for every club”.
Judging by the results it appears the two Doctors were far too busy crunching numbers to watch any football last season.
City’s ratings not only have Jordan outranking Ball, but place Barton as our 16th best player last season, trailing behind the likes of Dabo, Hamann and Corradi. Samaras is rated our fourth best player and Vassell our worst.
In case you missed them, my season’s player ratings can be found here.