Alright folks, let me walk you through my little experiment with predicting the Poland vs. Ukraine match. Honestly, I’m no sports analyst, just a regular guy who likes to tinker around with data and see what I can dig up.
First things first, I gathered my data. I’m talking about team stats, recent performance, player injuries, historical match results – the whole shebang. Scraped it from various sports websites, some were easy, some were a real pain to get working. Felt like I was back in my coding bootcamp days!
Then, I started cleaning things up. You wouldn’t believe the mess some of this data was in! Wrong formats, missing values, you name it. Spent a good chunk of time just wrangling the data into something usable. Let me tell you, cleaning data is like 80% of any project, right?
Next up, I decided on the factors that I thought were most important. Goal scoring average? Defence strength? Home advantage? I gave each factor a weight based on what I thought would matter most in this particular game. It’s pretty subjective, I know, but hey, that’s part of the fun!
After that, I created a simple model. Nothing too fancy, just a weighted sum of all those factors. Plugged in the numbers, crunched the calculations, and boom! It spit out a prediction. I won’t bore you with the formulas, but it involved a lot of multiplication and addition.
So, what did my prediction say? Well, according to my model, Poland was slightly favored to win. But honestly, it was super close. The model showed it was almost a coin flip.
I gotta say, the actual match was way more exciting than my calculations! I watched it with some friends, and it was a nail-biter. My prediction was okay-ish, but the game had so many unexpected turns that my simple model just couldn’t capture.
Ultimately, this was a fun little project. I learned a lot about data collection, cleaning, and modeling. Plus, it gave me a good excuse to watch some soccer with my buddies. Would I bet my life savings on my predictions? Definitely not! But it’s a cool way to get a little more invested in the game.
- Data Gathering: Scraped data from multiple sports sites.
- Data Cleaning: Standardized formats, handled missing values.
- Factor Selection: Identified key performance indicators.
- Model Building: Created a weighted sum model.
- Prediction Output: Poland favored, but very close.
Maybe next time, I’ll try a more sophisticated model. Machine learning, anyone? 
