With Euro 2012 about to kick off, we are encouraged to be optimistic about England’s chances. The good news? According to Dr Ian McHale, Chair of the Royal Statistical Society’s new Sports Section,  England is the third best team in the championship and has quite a good chance of beating Ireland in the quarter finals, getting to the semi finals… and then of probably being beaten by Germany in the semis. This extra insight

The Harvard professor Michael Sandel takes aim at the intrusion of markets and selling into culture, society and sports in his new book What Money Can’t Buy – the Moral Limits of Markets. His examples are mainly from the USA, showing a society where people will sell anything and everything, corrupting themselves. One is about the New York companies who pay people to stand in a queue to get free

John Fraser, TACTICIAN.org.uk and Dr Nuran Fraser, Manchester Metropolitan University look at the way in which information can be leveraged through data and statistics in golf. Moneyball by Michael Lewis is regarded by many as a seminal text in the use of  statistical performance analysis within the world of professional sports.  In Moneyball, Lewis focuses on American baseball. In it, he describes how the Oakland Athletics baseball team utilised the data rich sport

Sports are physical, mostly outdoor activities. Statistics is usually thought of as a desk-bound, intellectual activity. So, where’s the connection? Where do data and stats come into play in sport? Numbers or data don’t just speak for themselves. They need analysis. Statistics are the result – quantities or measurements derived from data. Interpreting these statistics shines a light on what the data means. And it is this statistical information that can then be

‘Vital Statistics: sport’s key to successful decision-making’ the getstats event on the first day of the British Science Festival in Bradford offered a great showcase for the role of statistics in sport: – John Haigh, University of Sussex and co-author of ‘The Hidden Mathematics of Sport’  spoke about medal expectations in the Olympic Games, the time in a match when a cynical soccer player might risk a Red Card offence, flamboyance versus consistency in golf, and

Look out for “Moneyball”, starring Brad Pitt due to open in the UK this autumn. It follows the way team manager Billy Beane brought new success to the Oakland As in baseball, by using statistics to identify players who could add extra value to a team’s performance. Bringing Brad to the British Science Festival in Bradford (at least in the form of a Moneyball poster at the getstats stand) was a