Özet:

In this study, Liverpool FC players’ performance in three English Premier League (EPL) seasons is aimed to be examined. Specifically, this papers scopes on whether players’ performances significantly differ on derbies and against Top 6 teams. Players (n=725) are divided into four groups in respect to their positions on the pitch (goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders, attackers) and their performance data is collected from WhoScored.com, a website which gathers basic and advanced statistics from football leagues all around the world. By calculating players’ different statistics with respect to their position in competition into Z-Scores and taking their average, we conducted T-Tests to measure whether Liverpool players perform significantly different in derbies/Top 6 matches and non-derby/Top 6 matches. All data are collected on personal computers and analyses are conducted on IBM SPSS 25.0. We found that goalkeepers did not perform significantly different between two types of matches while defenders, midfielders and attackers significantly differed (p<.05). In addition, we used support vector machine (SVM) algorithms to classify to differentiate two different types of matches with an accuracy of 97.77% overall.

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