New article at FiveThirtyEight: A Win Probability Guide to US vs. Australia

I have a new article up at FiveThirtyEight: A Win Probability Guide to US vs. Australia. Continuing my rather unhealthy obsession with in-game/in-match win probability, I took last year's work on mens soccer probability and applied it to the womens game. The US is a heavy favorite against Australia, and will be for all three of its so-called "Group of Death" matches. Win probabilities for mismatches evolve very differently than for evenly matched teams, and the post is a guide to how the US outlook evolves in the event they don't establish an early lead.

Data for womens sports is not exactly abundant, and soccer was no exception. The data for the model was culled from recent seasons of top league play. It took some effort, as well as some tedious cleaning to compile the data, and in the end, my final dataset consisted of just 950 matches (compared to the 3,000+ matches that all but fell in my lap for mens soccer). So, the model built here may be somewhat more prone to noise (or overly smoothed) than models built from a more robust dataset.