Decision Technology has built a range of proprietary models for football (soccer) prediction and player analysis.

Dr Paul Jackson is a Project Manager with DecTech and he's on the podcast to talk about his journey from being the son of a bookie, to a PHD in High Energy Physics and finally his career in sports analytics including soccer predictions and betting.

Punting Insights

How DecTech were deep into analytics well before the Moneyball phenomenon

Why the model's inputs are not over-complicated

Rating players across different competitions

How they help high net worth clients with their own trading

Why they are looking to expand to t20 cricket, snooker and rugby

Today's Guest:

Paul Jackson

Dave Duffield:

G'day Paul, thanks for joining us.

We are betting from all angles but you're certainly the first person I've had on that has a PHD in high energy physics.

Paul Jackson:

There's actually quite a few physicists in the statistical community at the moment it feels like.

Dave Duffield:

There's a crossover there, is there?

Paul Jackson:

Oh, definitely.

Dave Duffield:

You did the PHD and then ended up in financial services, just tell the listeners a little bit about your background.

Paul Jackson:

Yeah, sure. Funnily enough actually back when I was a kid my dad was a bookmaker, so it's quite ironic to be on the other side, especially as he taught me that in the long run it's the bookie who always wins.

I did a degree in Physics and then took that on to a PHD in High Energy Physics, and then decided it was time to go into the real world, unfortunately, so I worked for a company called SunGard who are a financial services company. A lot of my friends were quite surprised at the jump from physics to finance, but there's the use of these transferable skills ... So modelling and statistical analysis and developing code. High Energy Physics is probably 90% about writing good code rather than physics.

Then after doing that for a few years, I decided that I wanted a better work / life balance, and so was looking around for an interesting challenge, and found DecTech. The plan was to go and work at DecTech and retrain as a behavioural scientist, but I very quickly managed to get transferred onto the sports analytics team. I've been with DecTech for five years now.

Dave Duffield:

So you transferred to sports analytics, was that all part of your grand plan?

Paul Jackson:

Not initially, I mean I was certainly fascinated to see that DecTech was doing work in this area as well. But I have to say once I did behavioural science the work of the analytics team was clearly much more interesting for me personally.

Dave Duffield:

What is that work, what does DecTech actually do?

Paul Jackson:

DecTech is a spin out from Warwick University, so they were set up to apply behavioural science to real world situations, basically to help FTSE 100 companies use the insights of the latest behavioural research to effectively sell more stuff. In that first year of setting up, Henry decided that he'd also like to turn his hand at a football model, and out of that model grew the sports analytics side of the company.

Dave Duffield:

You might want to talk about that football model, is the origins of that the Fink Tank ratings?

Paul Jackson:

Yeah, it's how the Fink Tank came about. The model that Henry worked with he famously predicted Senegal's win over France in 2002. And I suspect that it was just more likely that there would be an upset, obviously we're all about probability. But Daniel Finkelstein, who's now Lord Finkelstein, heard this on the radio, got in touch and that's where the Fink Tank was born. That's continued now, so that's ... What's it's 2016 so fourteen years that's been going now?

Dave Duffield:

Okay, so I mean you can't go into too much detail as to how they’re generated,