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Markets & strategy

Incumbent Baselines

Summary + sample · full document is 1,406 words

Summary

The strongest public model in each category, plus the metric it claims and where the claim comes from. The point is to set a target: if our Phase 3 baseline can't match these, we don't have an edge yet.

Sample sizes, leagues, and time windows differ across these references — direct head-to-head comparisons are not always clean. Where comparison is muddy, the entry says so.


Sample

Player rating — single composite

ModelOwnerMethodPublic accessClaimed metric / validation
g+ (Goals Added)American Soccer AnalysisVAEP-family on event dataFree, MLS + USL + NWSL public ratingsDecomposed into six action types; correlates with team-level goal difference at R² ≈ 0.6+ over season samples. Self-published, MLS-focused.
OBV (On-Ball Value)StatsBombVAEP-family on event data with proprietary feature setFree club-level ratings published; per-player ratings soldPer-player and per-action; documented in StatsBomb whitepapers. Validated against subjective expert evaluation and sale price.
VAEPKU Leuven (Decroos et al.)P(score) − P(concede) over next k actionsFree socceraction libraryKDD 2019 paper; correlates with manager and scout assessments better than expected goals alone.
xT (Expected Threat)Karun SinghPossession-grid MarkovFree, public methodologySimpler than VAEP/OBV; baseline in many academic studies.

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