Two quick links

I know this is probably late, but if you haven't got a World Cup tracking service or document yet and are in to Excel, you might find this blog post by a friend very interesting. Diego Oppenheimer at Microsoft has put together an outstanding template for all you World Cup junkies - essentially you watch the games, fill in the results as they happen, and the spreadsheet gives you real time results of who makes it out of group play and who doesn't. Diego has done a great job of both providing the finished product and what he started with and the instructions to get to the finished product for all you people looking to learn more about how Excel functions. I'd highly recommend checking it out, and seeing what you can do to expand the spreadsheet or improve it.

Secondly, I got a nice few links at a regular reader's blog. Brett and I have been conversing a good bit the last week or two about Soccernomics, soccer statistics, and the possibility of a player metric like +/- from hockey being applied to soccer. He's been pushing me to think hard about how to improve statistics as they relate to soccer, and I appreciate it. Of course I also appreciate the links. If you have time, check out his personal blog as well as his business intelligence blog. BI, when done right, is basically business statistics. The same could be said of soccer statistics applied in a professional setting.