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Methodology
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SeatPick sought to carry out a study of bottling in football. This phenomenon was looked at from two perspectives: team perspective using historical match data and fan perspective using reddit data and sentiment analysis.
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What is considered a bottle job in this study? A bottle job is when a team loses from a winning position, for example 2-0 to 2-3 or 1-0 to 1-2. A draw can also be considered a bottle job, for example 2-0 to 2-2 or 1-0 to 1-1 (in the case of 1-1 matches were considered a bottle job only if the equaliser goal was scored after 80th minute)
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To find mentions of fans about bottle jobs and the sentiment that accompanied them while talking about it, we analysed Reddit fan discussion for the Deloitte Top-30 clubs using per-subreddit packs from Academic Torrents.
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For each club’s subreddit we worked with two compressed files—one of posts and one of comments—containing the Top 40,000 items by Reddit score, spanning 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2024. Because the packs were already ranked by score, we didn’t re-rank them; we only checked dates and put the data in a consistent shape.
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To prepare the data, we ran a streaming pass that read each file line by line, kept only entries within the 2020–2024 window, marked whether each entry was a post or a comment, and saved the results by club and by year. This approach lets us process large files without loading everything into memory.
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For the analysis, we grouped entries by month and club, then counted basic activity: total messages, numbers of posts and comments, and rough word totals. We also looked for talk of “bottling” using a two-step approach. First, we searched for clear phrases in English such as “bottled it”, “bottle job”, “choked”, “collapsed”, or “threw the lead away”, while filtering out obvious red herrings like “water bottle” or “bottleneck”. Second, when the wording hinted at the same idea, we looked for close matches to common expressions, including frequent slang in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Dutch (for example, pecheada, amarelou, verkackt, buttare via). When we found a likely “bottling” mention, we measured the tone by analysing a short snippet around the phrase rather than the whole post, so the sentiment reflected that specific moment.
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We present the results as three tables. A monthly table shows each club’s activity and “bottling” mentions over monthly time. A yearly table shows club’s activity and “bottling” mentions year by year, additionally the percentage change was calculated to see how it changed over time. A summary table rolls those figures up by club.
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Note:
positive sentiment: compound score >= 0.05
neutral sentiment: (compound score > -0.05) and (compound score < 0.05)
negative sentiment: compound score <= -0.05
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Note: Olympique de Marseille, Eintracht Frankfurt, Flamengo (Brazil) were excluded from the sentiment study due to their subreddit being private or were not present in the top 40k subreddit of academic torrents.
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The second perspective of “bottling” was studied by scraping 5 years of historical match data of each Deloitte Top-30 club from fbref.com. This resulted in more than 7000 match logs which had more than 150000 shooting events. All of the events in match logs were analysed to find “bottling” matches for each team. Furthermore, the number of matches where 2+ lead was thrown away by either a draw or a lost game were found. Both teams that bottle the most and teams that it is easiest to bottle against were found. What is more, the formation of teams were analysed to find in what formation team bottle the most. Actual goals and Expected goals in both all games and key games (Semi-finals, Final, Quarter-finals, Third-place match) were compared to find which teams let in more goals than expected.
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Sources
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https://academictorrents.com/details/1614740ac8c94505e4ecb9d88be8bed7b6afddd4
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https://fbref.com/en/
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