Basic analysis of football stats (Part 1)

Greetings to all fans of football and football statistics!

Today the Corner-stats.com team decided to touch upon an interesting issue of basic analysis of teams statistics for the upcoming football match, which can give everyone serious food for thought.

So, for example, let's take the Italian Serie A match between Inter and Venezia, which will take place on 01/22/2022, and try to predict the corners in this match.

Consider the summary table of corners of the current season:

Corner-stats.com team proposes to build corners prediction only on the basic statistics from this table and discard all other factors (field factor (home-away), change of a coach, games with similar opponents, or others). So, Inter delivers an average of 6.19 corners per match, and Venezia delivers 2.95 corners per match, which we may take as our forecast.

But you may rightly note that corners depend not only on how the team takes them, but also on how the opponent allows corners at its goal. In our table, this corresponds to the opponent's corners total. To take into account at the same time how a team delivers and how an opponent allows corners, we will use a simple formula for the arithmetic mean of these indicators:

Expected corners Team 1 (Corners_1) = ( Team 1 individual total (Team1_IT1) + Team 2 opponents' total (Team2_IT2) ) / 2;

Expected corners Team 2 (Corners_2) = ( Team 2 individual total (Team2_IT1) + Team 1 opponents' total (Team1_IT2) ) / 2;

In the case of Inter - Venezia match, we will receive the following data:

Corners_1 = ( 6.19 + 6.62 ) / 2 = 6.41

Corners_2 = ( 2.95 + 3.86 ) / 2 = 3.41

Thus, we expect that Inter will deliver 6.41 corners in the upcoming match, and Venezia 3.41 corners, which approximately corresponds to a handicap of -3 and a total of 9.5 corners (you can calculate the bookmaker's line more accurately based on the expected figures of the teams using the tool Calculate line on Corner-stats football stats service).

And now we want to ask our users, do you think this calculation is logical and correct? Or do you have any doubt about it? We invite you to leave your comment on this issue in our Telegram chat, and the Corner-stats.com team will provide its own answer in our next post.