Papers I Keep Replaying

Cormac Kelleher

@statlinesunday

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These are the ones I keep shoving at teammates and anyone daft enough to ask why I trust numbers as much as my own eyes. Proper academic stuff, but each one has at least one idea you can bring straight to a five‑a‑side, a Sunday league dugout, or a pub argument after a scrappy 1–0. Couple of them are heavy going, sure, but they all earn their place on the reading list.

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Papers I Keep Replaying — 4 items
Name	Year	Sport / Domain	Key Idea	One Concrete Detail	My take
1The Understat Revolution: Using xG to Predict Football Match Outcomes	2017	Football analytics	Shows how expected goals beats shots and possession for predicting results over a season.	Looks at more than 10 seasons of European league data to test different models.	The first time I realised a 25-yard screamer and a six-yard tap-in can’t be treated the same in a spreadsheet.
2The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences	1985	Basketball / psychology	Argues that fans and players see streaks everywhere, even when shots are basically random.	Checked shooting records from the 1980–81 Philadelphia 76ers to test the “hot hand” belief.	Great cure for shouting “he’s on fire” after two shots; makes you ask if it’s form or just coin flips.
3The Advantages of Segmenting Possession in Football	2014	Football tactics / data	Splits matches into possession chains instead of treating them as one long blur, so you can rate moves not just players.	Defines a possession as ending with a shot, a turnover, or the ball going out of play.	Once you start thinking in chains instead of minutes, you never watch a buildup the same way again.
4On the Importance of Set Pieces in Soccer	2018	Football set pieces	Quantifies just how many goals and points come from dead balls versus open play.	Finds that roughly a quarter of goals in top leagues come from set pieces.	After this, you’ll spend more time on corners at training and less time arguing about wingers cutting inside.