Carlos Teves Transfer News

Carlos Tevez-Roberto Mancini disclosed that Manchester City have agreed a fee with Brazilian club Corinthians .

City have accepted a bid  of £40 million after rejecting an initial appoach by Corinthians of £35 million for star Argentine player Tevez .Tevez had a good last season The deal is likely to be confirmed by Wednesday, before the closing of the transfer window.
"We have an agreement with Corinthians but Carlos now is still a City player," Mancini said.
Asked whether Tevez would now be allowed to discuss personal terms, Mancini said: "I don't know this.
I repeat, at the moment, Carlos is still a City player.
"I want to wait. At the moment we are here, we are working with the other guys. We should think about this.''

Manchester City enter race for Modric?

According to British media, Manchester City has entered the race to sign Croatian footballer Luka Modric, who has the same source and the target of Manchester United and Chelsea.

Manchester United and Chelsea both are keen for Luka Modric and are ready to triple the wages of Croatia midfielder Luka Modric to entice him to leave Tottenham.

Modric, 25, would cost about 30 million pounds , with both clubs all set to pay him 130,000 pounds-a-week net .

Jerome Boateng keen to Join Bayern Munich

Manchester City  defender Jerome Boateng admits that he is excited to join Bayern Munich.
According to him Bayern are bigger than manc and it'll be a honour to play for the club.
Boateng joined Manchester City from Hamburg on a 5-year deal almost12 months ago but is already eger on a return to the Bundesliga.

While the players want to join Bayern is  clear,but  the  clubs have yet to concur on the transfer fee.

 Manchester City asked for about €20 million, while Bayern are ready to pay €12.5 million.

REAL MADRID - ADEBAYOR | IT IS OFFICIAL

REAL MADRID has announced that it is official. MANCHESTER CITY forward EMMANUEL ADEBAYOR has been "signed" until the end of this season. The player comes without a transfer fee & will be on loan until the end of the season, Real Madrid has an option of a buy (14M€) if the Club decides to take it up. Real Madrid does pay however the high salary that Adebayor has in his contract of around 2M€

REAL MADRID RECONSIDER EMMANUEL ADEBAYOR OF MANCHESTER CITY

News being published on the mayor Spanish Sports online channels tonight indicate that REAL MADRID will now attempt to get over to Madrid MANCHESTER CITY 26 year old forward EMMANUEL ABEBAYOR. The negative posture from German Club Hamburg in accepting the 2M€ ( + a friendly match) offer for Ruud Van Nistelrooy has forced the Spanish Club to go back on its tracks & consider again the Togo player.

Conceding Halftime Leads in the Premier League: Why Arsenal’s Collapse Against Tottenham was a One-In-Forty Occurrence

You should be angry, Arsene!

Just how rare was Arsenal’s second half collapse against Tottenham Hotspur on November 20^th?  Sure it was Tottenham’s first victory at the Emirates, and its first win as the away team in this fixture in seventeen years.  Teams come and go in the Premier League as do players, so I don’t put much stock in such streaks.  The better question to ask is how rare was this collapse when looking at historical averages.  Chris Anderson from Soccer By the Numbers has been kind enough to supply the data behind his recent post on halftime leads and fulltime results (EPL seasons 05/06 through 09/10), and the results do indeed make Arsenal’s collapse look like a very rare event.

First, let’s look at all results without declaring if the team that is ahead at halftime is home or away and whether or not they went into halftime with a clean sheet.  This produces the table below.

The rows on the left indicate the halftime lead, and the columns across the top are the full time result.  The results for a halftime lead of 2 goals indicate that regardless of location or a halftime cleansheet, historical data indicates that Arsenal had a 95% chance of winning, a 3% chance of drawing, and 2% chance of losing.

Taking the analysis one step further, the data set is isolated for leads at home to produce the table below.

In examining this result, Arsenal as the home team still had a 95% chance of winning, a 2.5% chance of drawing, and a 2.5% chance of losing. It turns out that further reducing the data for a cleansheet while at home does not change the numbers for a two goal lead.  Nonetheless, the table below is provided for those interested in other clean sheet halftime leads and their results.

Ultimately, this means Arsenal’s loss was a one-in-forty occurrence given their two goal lead at home with a clean sheet at the half.  Even without Kabul’s winning goal in the 86^th minute Arsenal would have still experienced a one-in-twenty collapse in conceding a draw with such a halftime advantage.

Of the other four such collapses the last five seasons, one team features twice and each of the two teams in this latest occurrence play a role in the other two matches.

First, Manchester City experienced such a fate twice in one calendar year.  The first time, April 26^th 2008, saw City go ahead 2-0 in the first twenty one minutes, only to concede three goals in the final twenty one minutes of play against Fulham.  Liverpool then repeated the feat of overcoming a 0-2 Man City lead on October 5^th, 2008 with Torres and Kuyt keying the Reds’ comeback.

West Ham United experienced a similar collapse against none other than Tottenham on March 4^th, 2007.  Carlos Tevez contributed to the 2-0 halftime lead, while Tottenham battled back even by the 63^rd minute.  This match was the only one of the four where the team leading at halftime subsequently took the lead again after relinquishing it in the second half, all off a Bobby Zamora goal in the 85^th minute as a substitute.  Tottenham then battled back with two goals in the final minutes, including the winner in the 6^th minute of stoppage time.

Ironically, Arsenal played the roll of spoiler in the fourth-and-final match as they came back on Bolton on March 29^th, 2008.  Not only did the Gunners embarrass Bolton on their home pitch, but they did so down a man the entire second half.

It seems as if Arsenal is in rare company, having been on both ends of such an event.  Tottenahm is also in a rare position, having won two of the five occurrences.  I doubt any of the other collapses were as painful for those teams as Arsenal’s collapse in the latest iteration of the North London Derby.

The (statistical) past is not always prologue

The future complexion of the top 4 in the EPL has taken a light blue color.

Stone Cold Arsenal had a good post today about the power shift we are witnessing in the EPL.

The two biggest casualties of the shift of the power axis are Liverpool and Manchester United. In two very different ways, they are tangible case studies of ’the beginning of the end’ of an era of domination by the two clubs.

Liverpool is in a more perilous state right now from the point of view that the lack of Champions league football next season will be a catalyst for a lengthy spell in the wilderness of mid-table mediocrity.

United and Liverpool are surely heading south, and their performances on the field have shown this all season. Unfortunately for both clubs, assumptions about success on the field have been made when projecting the financial fortunes of the respective clubs.

There are no billionaires from Russia waiting to burn their oil dollars; or no Sheikh’s from the middle east looking for a play toy. The constant hope that clubs will be ’rescued’ by a sugar daddy of sorts is a lottery gamble that is farfetched from reality.

Liverpool have tried to invite investment and have failed miserably. In truth, Liverpool needed more of a marriage counsellor than they needed a high net worth investor; Gillett and Hicks were constantly bitching at each other it’s hard to see who would have been interested in throwing their money in there.

I re-tweeted this post earlier today, but I think it deserves special comment given my blog content. In most cases, statistics are a summary of the past. There are fields, like Design for Six Sigma, which can use analytical tools to simulate phenomena and the variation of system output based upon a variety of factors. Sometimes they even involve testing of early prototypes for similar purposes. But these activities are reserved for large organizations looking to turn out an engineered product used in a predictable fashion, not the seemingly random nature of a soccer match.

Thus, we are limited to using historical data and the assumption that future behavior will follow a similar pattern. We use averages and distributions to talk about the most likely outcome of an event. If the last few years of economic turmoil taught us anything, it's that putting too much faith in the statistics and models such that the whole market buys into them produces disastrous results when the whole thing comes tumbling down quickly. What looked like an invincible four at the top of the EPL is now down to a shaky three. Portsmouth is in administration. The Spanish league almost went on strike over unpaid wages. Soccernomics proved that there is no correlation between wins and transfer fees, yet owners keep blowing millions on them. We may be at a tipping point in the soccer world.

My point is this: be cautious how much you read into statistical analyses. Always question whether or not a paradigm shift or disruption has happened that might change teams' or players' behavior. In statistical speak, this might be viewed as "special cause variation". Perhaps the famous Soccernomics English League soccer payroll/table finish regression should be viewed more as a historical snapshot than a predictor of the 2011 table outcome. Maybe not. Just remember that statistics are often historical snapshots - static analyses of often very dynamic environments that can change at a moment's notice.