Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) How is Group C the group of Death when Group A have the top Spanish team top English team and a German team that could probally be the top German team. Hamburg is a good team but are not close to Bremen. I hope PSV does well and to see beaz playing CL ball again
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Yeah, Group A is definitely much tougher than Group C.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) group b and c look like the most unpredictable... group a may have the champions of 3 of the "big 4"... its kinda dope...
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) The problem with this is that while it works for a team that everyone recognizes is good because of its domestic display, it causes problems for teams that have done well domestically but not in the Champions League. For example, a team like Chievo or Osasuna (had they made it) has a solid ranking in a top-flight league. Do you seed them ahead of Porto or Benfica, who have had great runs in the last two years, just because they're Italian and Spanish? How do you compare those teams? Several of the participants (including FC Kobenhavn and Levski Sofia) won their domestic leagues and have not played in the Champions League before; should they be rated ahead of an Arsenal or a Werder Bremen? The seeding system is designed more to ensure that the top 16 teams are matched with the bottom 16 teams than to differentiate #5 from #9; to that end, it is pretty effective. Anything placing more emphasis on domestic results would either overcompensate the champions of weaker leagues, or overcompensate the mediocre clubs from the biggest leagues, by either overvaluing championships or overvaluing strength of domestic league. Sure, the current system makes it harder to establish yourself as a dominant European club - that's not necessarily a negative. If you can come up with a systematic approach that would fix the "problem" of Chelsea being a #9 rather than #5, but would not (when applied equally to all teams) cause even worse discrepancies between the 9-16 and 17-24 teams, I'd like to see it. Because the latter problem would lead to far more unbalanced groups. For example, replace any top seed in a group with Roma (a middle #2) and have a new group with both a top seed and Valencia - no real change. By contrast, replace any third seed in a group with Roma, and it becomes very unbalanced, while a clear minnow is likely to squeak out of the revised Group D.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Good points. I never looked at the issue from that point of view. I was focusing on obvious big exclusions, while ignoring the smaller leagues. What are the league coefficeints used for? Are they not used to compare leagues? Maybe this is an Americanized idea, but why can't UEFA appoint a panel of experts that are spread out equally amongst all leagues. This panel meets and votes on the Top 16 seeds based on expectation of sucess in the CL. This "expectation of sucess" can encompase results from the last two season, but also must includes effect of roster turnover from the previous season. This system takes into account team form both present and past, but avoids results 3, 4 and 5 years in the past where the team on the whole have little bearing on the sucess of the current team. These clubs are then matched-up 1 vs 16, 2 vs 15 and so-on and so-forth. The remaining 16 are broken into two groups and the current draw process is used from that point to fill out the groups. This process is more fair, because it avoids obvious omissions such as Chelsea, while at the same time putting teams just outside the Top 16 in more equal draws, since seeding 16-32 would be a lot harder than seeding teams 1-16. The only real controversey would be the teams 8 and 9 and teams 15 16 and 17, 18. 8 and 9 is not an issue, because 8 and 9 match-up in the Group Stage. The advantage is only slight for 15, 16 over 17, 18 because 17 is will not to be put with a Group of say 1 and 9, equally 24 won't be put in a Group of 8 and 16. I guess that this could be done just as well with the current system by simple matching-up based on seeds, but the voting system is more apt to get the Top 16 right in my mind than the current system.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Yeah, I don't see that either. G is also thougher. Everybody over here is pretty happy with the draw for PSV. Absolute a chance of getting to the 2nd round.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Well, in America, with the NCAA basketball tourney being the best example, the purpose of seeding is to rank the teams in order of their current strength. I've never gotten that such a precise seeding was desirable in European competitions. Good and bad points to each, I suppose, but having a mixture of strong and weak groups has always had a certain appeal to me. With a precise top to bottom seeding you'd have much more even groups, which adds, I suppose, a degree of "fairness" (if such a term even applies in this case) but it removes some of the intrigue that you can get with a less precise seeding system. Anyway, from Arena to Mourinho, people love to complain that their seeding, or lack thereof, does not reflect their current form, which seems silly to me as it isn't supposed to.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) No. And he's german not american.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) So instead of using past performances in the competition as a seeding tool, you advocate appointing some guys to guess how each team will do to come to their seeding?
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Seedings for European club competitions should be based on performance in European club competitions. Seedings for European Championship and World Cup qualification should be based on performance in European Championship and World Cup qualifications. Thankfully, they are. It is the only way to compare apples with apples, and not apples with oranges. Jose can complain all he wants, but to be honest I think most people stopped paying attentiona while ago. If he wants a higher seeding, he ought to try winning more European games. As for the fate of the Americans in the competition: it doesn't look good.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Someone needs to tell Jose what to root for in a group of four draw. Remember, you're playing for second, not first. The ideal draw is to have the best team in your group, and two teams that are not as good as you are. That way, you and the other good team pound the weak teams four times each, knocking them out, and the two good teams advance without a problem. What the good teams do against each other becomes irrelevant, if they take care of business against the weak teams. It becomes much more of a crapshoot if 1, 2 and 3 are all more or less even. When do we find out whether we will get to see any of the YAs on ESPN? Also, does anyone know if the ESPN HD broadcasts will actually be in HD?
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Even without VofH? Koeman better get another striker ASAP.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) "Some guys" - I would define as knowledgable journalists, FA representatives or people from similar cloth. Their would also be an equal number of voters from each league/country to attempt to remove as much bias as possible. Not three blokes off the street. "Guess" - I would define as an educated assement of a teams predicted performance in the CL based on both past results and current team strength. If you make those changes then, yes, I would advocate that over inferring a teams current chance of sucess based off of the sucess (or lack their of sucess) from 3, 4 and 5 years ago.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) The G14 are a head ache for the UEFA, so they donot have any saying on that. Maybe I'm not the only one who dislikes a team built up with money stolen from the Russian people.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Fearrington, Hangeland I have read some speculation that UEFA may assign weights to the last five years, so that the most recent years are favored. Of course, this doesn't address any recent transfers. I think that many people are looking for a very objective, transparent system, hence the need for spreadsheets rather than votes from a committee. You can find more discussion of the technicalities at the site that Cannon mentioned. It has a forum as well as the statistics.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) It's been that way for the last ... oh, 1000 years there. With the exception of soccer teams, naturally.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Therein lies the flaw in your idea. No offence MSchofield
you know, looking through FC Kobenhavn's squad, they have some great players. Marcus Allback, Jesper Gronkjaer, Razak Pimpong (we all know him), Tobias Linderoth, and Jamil Fearrington (had to prop our boy). I know who I'm pulling for in that group.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) A knowledgeable opinion, is still at the end of the day just an opinion. Theres that word prediction, Prediction is a guess, no fannying around, its a guess. Would any of these knowledgeable folk have gues- sorry, "Predicted" basle would have got out of the group stages a few years back? would they have predicted artmedia last season would have beaten porto to a uefa cup berth? Would they buggery. If you make those changes you would be best to eliminate anyone not from from England, Spain or Italy from the competition and have done with.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Knowledgeable opinions of future results even if they are just opinions might be a better indication of future results than historical results. Your not asking these folks to be fortunetellers. You are simply asking them to look at the teams and make a list of what teams have the best chance of winning the CL. I would reason that nobody would have guessed any of those results, but I seriously doubt that "historical results" could have done better. ------- Here is the crux of my arguement. What happend 3, 4 and 5 years ago has no bearing on the quality of any team in 06/07. Their may be a few trends, you can see who is "historically" better, but if you don't also think about what is going on currently you missing the most important piece of information about what will happen in the near future. Example: When bookmakers are creating odds (predicting who they think is a stronger side) on who will win the fixture between Barca and Chelsea, do you really think they consider the quality of Chelsea 4 and 5 season ago? Its all about 06/07 Chelsea matches-up against 06/07 Barca. ------- In my eyes, UEFA is saying Chelsea "We think you are the 9th most likely team to win the CL." While the bookmaker, who's livelyhood depends on the getting the most accurate reading based on all information say "Chelsea is the 2nd most likely to win the CL." If someone gave you the odds of Bayern Munich (9th according to the odds) at 16/1, but let you pick Chelsea is that fair? ------- Maybe the differance of opinion is based on the definition of the word "seed." Seed in the tournament sense to me means "direct reflection of a teams chances to win said tournament." Does it mean something differnet to you?
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) Bookies don't try to predict results of games, they try to predict betting patterns.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) http://numeridicalcio.wordpress.com/2006/08/15/european-club-ratings-20052006-final/ The system's not perfect by any means, but it does what you say it does. It takes into account what a team does in Europe and what it does domestically in their league and obtains a rating: Barcelona #1, Chelsea #2 as most agree it should be. Now of course in club football things can change dramatically due to infusions of cash and other sudden changes in fortune, but as a general rule, past performance is a fairly solid predictor of future performance in European football. If a team suddenly gets much better or worse, the system will correct itself soon enough.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) And predicting betting patterns ties heavily into predicting the expected outcome of the game. The two are practically intertwined. How can you accurately gauge betting patterns without first trying to accuratly predict the result based on all information? Its impossible. Anyway, I think you understood the principal of my arguement.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) The guy is missing clubs from Denmark, Poland, Norway and Switzerland.
Re: Champion's League Draw (Beasley, Nguyen, Rossi, Feilhaber, Jamil Fearrington) The guy is me and read the instructions. It features the teams from the 16 top divisions in Europe. It also has ratings for general Champions League and UEFA Cup teams from those leagues here: http://numeridicalcio.wordpress.com/2006/08/16/european-club-ratings-proxies-20052006-final/ Poland's champions league teams are ranked lower than relegated teams from 7 different countries. If keeping Poland out is a problem, keeping the Coca cola Championship out is one too. Ths system gives a general idea of where Poland stands, that will suffice for now. The problem is that using domestic results from every single European league is iimpractical for me to do unless I'm getting paid. I'd need a lot more hours available to do it, and a significantly better machine to crunch the data. So the concession I made was to use 'proxy' teams for relegated clubs/lower division clubs and clubs that were from countries not in those top 16. This saves me a lot of additional data collection work and computing headaches, and still provides information on the gneral quality of teams from those levels of play. Ultimately the system itself is more important to me than the ratings. If I can get/show the system to work, it's easily applied to larger chunks of data. With more time, money and computing power I could do more. As it is, I have 357 teams and close to 16,000 matches being used in the system. I plan on updating this, but if you tried to add more data to that, I'd never update it.