Winter

2015
Final Project
BMS 303
Forecasting Techniques
Dr. A. Tassen
William School of Business

[WAYNE ROONEY GOAL FORECAST]

By: Ahmed Al-own

This project is used to predict how many goals Wayne Rooney will score. Wayne Rooney is currently the
main striker for Manchester United. He has been one of the best strikers in the world for the past
decayed. Throughout his soccer career he has played with the best players in the world including
Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham. Each season he has gotten more experience and it seems that it
increases his performance on the pitch. Today Wayne Rooney is no longer the clear cut first choice as a
striker. The main role of a striker is to score goals and recently Manchester United purchase Falcao and
Robin Van Persie. Both extremely talented strikers that cost Manchester United a large amount of
capital.
This project can help the Manchester United staff bypass the dilemma of choosing who to play. It is
difficult to 100% predict who will score the most goals in any given season, due to the fact that there is
many different variable that affect goals scored.

Data:
Appearances: As we can see in ANOVA table (Appendix 2.3) this variable is the most significant. This is
mostly due that appearances have a lot of small variable within itself. An appearance is affected by
player injury. If a soccer player is injured he will not play and if he does not
Rooney
Appearances
play it is impossible for him to score any goals. Another factor that affects
2002/2003
42
appearances is performance. If a player is performing poorly during a
2003/2004
52
training session he most likely will not play in the next game. Competition is
2004/2005
49
also part of the factors that determine whether a player will play. If you
2005/2006
58
have a lot of super stars and a lot of players are performing well, it will be
2006/2007
60
harder to have as much appearances as a player would wish. As I mentioned
2007/2008
48
before Wayne Rooney has played many big super stars which could mean
2008/2009
56
his appearances could have been influenced significantly by competition.
2009/2010
56
There are many smaller variables that determine how many appearances a
2010/2011
46
player will achieve in any given season (personal issues, coaches, public
2011/2012
49
relations, fans, etc.). The ideal is to take these entire small variables and
2012/2013
44
run a regression but being an external individual it is impossible for me to
2013/2014
52
find these kinds of data. Therefore I pick Appearance for simplicity
2014/2015
39
purposes.

Red/yellow cards: In soccer season if a player manages to get more than 4 yellow cards he will have to
skip the next game. A red card means the player will have to skip
Rooney
Yellow Cards Red cards
three matches. Looking at the amount of yellow cards is important
2002/2003
0
0
to predict goals scored. This is mostly due that if a soccer player is
2003/2004
0
0
on a third yellow card he will try change his play style and play less
2004/2005
4
1
aggressive. This could lead to a drop in performance which leads
2005/2006
5
1
to a drop in goals scored. Players that usually get red cards are
2006/2007
9
0
considered of being in a slump and are not playing very well.
2007/2008
5
0
Often red cards in soccer come from players being frustrated on
2008/2009
9
1
how the game is developing. Players whom are performing well
2009/2010
8
0
will usually feel in control of the game. Although frustration can
2010/2011
7
1
come from a players own performance, it can also come from
2011/2012
9
0
pressure. When a match has a great importance or rivalry it
2012/2013
8
0
doesnt matter how well you play pressure can make a soccer
2013/2014
5
0
player crumble. Nevertheless it is still an important variable to
2014/2015
5
0
choose.
Age:
It is known that a soccer players prime age is between 23 and 26. Football experts explain that in the
early stage of the career of a
striker (17-21 years old) their
goals scored each season will
rapidity increase until it hits a
plateau between ages of 23
and 26. After that it very
slowly decreases back down
from 27 to 35 years old. As
we can see in the graph as
Wayne Rooneys age is
increasing he seems to be
scoring more goals. It
plateaus around the age of25
and then gradually drops
down. Experience is the main
reason why it does not drop back down as fast as it increased between the ages of 17 and 21. This is why
I chose to include age as a variable

Multiple Regressions:
This project is aiming at solving the issue that Manchester United coaches face every day. The issue to
choose between world classes strikers Wayne Rooney and Van Persie. I have taken all my Data from the
FA and FIFA official website. The Variables explained above will help me better forecast accurately. As
we can see below are the forecast of both Wayne Rooney and fan Persie.

Rooney
2002/2003
2003/2004
2004/2005
2005/2006
2006/2007
2007/2008
2008/2009
2009/2010
2010/2011
2011/2012
2012/2013
2013/2014
2014/2015
2015/2016

Rooney Goals
8
18
17
21
24
20
27
35
17
38
23
23
21

Period
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

Yellow
8
13
8
12
11
14
10
8
8
2
7
8
5
9

Red
1
0
0
2
0
0
1
0
0
1
0
0
1
0

Appearances
42
52
49
58
60
48
56
56
46
49
44
52
39
50

Age
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

Rooney FT
11
15
19
23
28
14
26
30
21
32
22
29
21
28

RVP
RVP Goals Period
Yellow
Red
Appearances
Age
RVP FT
2002/2003
0
1
0
0
2
19
0
2003/2004
0
2
0
0
0
20
0
2004/2005
11
3
4
1
43
21
15
2005/2006
12
4
5
1
45
22
17
2006/2007
17
5
9
0
35
23
19
2007/2008
11
6
5
0
30
24
16
2008/2009
21
7
9
1
45
25
20
2009/2010
12
8
8
0
30
26
19
2010/2011
24
9
7
1
35
27
16
2011/2012
44
10
9
0
57
28
34
2012/2013
35
11
8
0
53
29
33
2013/2014
27
12
5
0
36
30
24
2014/2015
13
13
5
0
33
31
23
2015/2016
14
6
0
34
32
23
In order to forecast how many goals each striker will score we simply need to enter the variable that we
think will happen next season. In this example we took the mean of how many yellows, red and
appearances each player incurred in their respective careers.

Accuracy:
When we look at the errors between what was forecasted and actually it is fairly low(Appendix 2.5 for
more graphs). The R square is at 0.79 which
makes it quite reliable. When we look at
Rooneys actual versus forecasted we see
that the forecasted data follows the trends
of the actual data. We can see that Wayne
Rooneys forecast is more accurate then
Robin Van Persie. Bellow we compare both
players forecast accuracy.

Multiple Regresion MAD

(Rooney)
MAPE
Multiple Regresion MAD
(RVP)
MAPE

3.3886002
0.1216026
5.854434696
0.185503151

Rooney has both MAD and MAPE lower than Robin Van Persie. Manchester United staff need to
understand that if both players forecasted goals are close to each other, Wayne Rooney s will be more
accurate and Robin Van Persies will be more inflated.

Seasonal Forecast:
In order the better help Manchester United. I decided to try to predict how many goals Wayne Rooney
will score in a given month. When I looked at the data it seemed that Rooney scores more goals
between December and February. I removed seasonality in the data, used the Browns method and then
re-added seasonality. Check excel file for more details on the process. Below is the forecast of how
many goals Rooney will score per month for the next season.

2015/2016
August
September
October
November
December
January
February
March
April
May
June

Forecast
1
2
3
2
2
2
2
3
3
0
1

We can see that Wayne Rooney will perhaps score more goals during
March, April and October. The Coaches could try to avoid playing Rooney
and play another striker in month where Rooney is predicted to score low
amount of goals.
Although the browns method predicted that Rooney will score 21 goals in
2015/2016, the regression method predicted that Rooney will score 28
goals. Nevertheless using this model we can see which months Rooney will
score the most in a season even if the data itself is not the most accurate.
We can see that the MAD and MAPE of the
Browns method is higher than the
Regression, therefore regression model is
more accurate.

Seasonal Model MAD

(Rooney)
MAPE

5.5
0.263689114

APPENDIX:
2.1)

2.2)

2.3)

SUMMARY OUTPUT ROONEY

SUMMARY OUTPUT ROBIN VAN PERSIE

Regression Statistics
Multiple R
0.847231254
R Square
0.717800798
Adjusted R Square
0.451701197
Standard Error
5.043941263
Observations
13

Regression Statistics
Multiple R
R Square
Adjusted R Square
Standard Error
Observations

ANOVA

ANOVA
df

Regression
Residual
Total

Intercept
Period
Yellow
Red
Appearances
Age

0.886909842
0.786609067
0.554913601
7.177283041
13

5
8
13

SS
MS
F Significance F
517.7000215 103.5400043 5.087192252 0.027529
203.5307477 25.44134347
721.2307692

Coefficients Standard Error

-32.33988985 18.24030642
0
0
-1.213815424 0.614887188
-0.408415335 2.29724461
0.934255767 0.259738502
0.819543525 0.471686422

2.4)

t Stat
-1.772990492
65535
-1.974045724
-0.17778487
3.596909045
1.737475336

P-value Lower 95%

0.114164471 -74.4021
#NUM!
0
#NUM! -2.63175
0.86331112 -5.70587
0.007013716 0.335298
0.12050583 -0.26817

df
Regression
Residual
Total
Upper 95% Lower 95.0% Upper 95.0%
9.722332185 -74.40211188 9.722332185
0
0
0
0.204116974 -2.631747822 0.204116974
4.889040235 -5.705870906 4.889040235
1.533213827 0.335297708 1.533213827
1.907254364 -0.268167315 1.907254364

Intercept
Period
Yellow
Red
Appearances
Age

SS
MS
F
Significance F
5 1519.123634 303.8247269 7.372469468 0.010333658
8 412.1071348 51.51339185
13 1931.230769

Coefficients Standard Error

-19.50564785 16.13050564
0
0
0.351006668 1.180591884
-5.312720405 5.363305217
0.507746987 0.244353574
0.770492763 0.754740441

t Stat
-1.209239703
65535
0.297314146
-0.990568351
2.077919221
1.020871178

P-value
0.261091944
#NUM!
#NUM!
0.350907198
0.071345569
0.337191618

Lower 95%
-56.70266056
0
-2.3714431
-17.68052441
-0.055733364
-0.969941815

Upper 95% Lower 95.0% Upper 95.0%

17.69136486 -56.70266056 17.69136486
0
0
0
3.073456436 -2.3714431 3.073456436
7.055083604 -17.68052441 7.055083604
1.071227338 -0.055733364 1.071227338
2.510927341 -0.969941815 2.510927341