Aston Villa are going for a fourth successive Premier League victory when they travel to Brighton on Wednesday, but should Unai Emery's side change the way they have been scoring goals on their winning run? There is apparently some debate about whether Villa's xG (expected goals) is unsustainable because they are scoring from long range, but that's nonsense, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. Villa have good players who can shoot from the edge of the box, so are you seriously going to tell them not to shoot now, because of xG? Give me a break. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For the midweek fixtures in week 14, he takes on musician, author and Fulham fan Felix White. White is the guitarist with The Maccabees and 86TVs. His new book'Whatever will be, will be: A Matter of Life and Football' is out now.

In order to find the country location for each video in previous Y ouTube-based datasets (e.g., Kinetics, HACS, etc.), we used the public Y ouTube API. 'The geolocation information associated with the video. In our measure, roughly 8% of the videos had such geolocation. We then used reverse-geocode library https://pypi.org/project/reverse-geocode/

How many times has Israel violated the ceasefire? How Israel is using'no war, no peace' model in Gaza How is Israel using PR firms to frame its war? Football's Pep Guardiola calls on fans to attend Palestine charity match NewsFeed Football's Pep Guardiola calls on fans to attend Palestine charity match Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola urged football fans to support an upcoming charity match featuring Palestine's national team at Barcelona's stadium, with the proceeds set to be donated to aid projects in Palestine. Ukraine's Kyiv pounded by hundreds of Russian drones Italian prosecutors investigate Bosnian war'sniper safaris' How many times has Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire?

England have cruised through World Cup qualifying, winning all seven of their games and scoring 20 unanswered goals, setting several records and leaving them on the cusp of another. If Thomas Tuchel's team beat Albania in Sunday's final qualifier (17:00 GMT) and keep a clean sheet, they will become the first European side to play at least six qualifiers and win them all without conceding. A clean sweep of victories - regardless of goals conceded - is also a rare achievement. Excluding the early years of the World Cup, when teams often played just a handful of preliminary matches, only four European countries have finished with a 100% winning record. Germany were the last side to do so on the way to the 2018 tournament, though they went on to suffer a shock early exit in Russia.

In football, attacking teams attempt to break through the opponent's defensive line to create scoring opportunities. This action, known as a Line Break, is a critical indicator of offensive effectiveness and tactical performance, yet previous studies have mainly focused on shots or goal opportunities rather than on how teams break the defensive line. In this study, we develop a machine learning model to predict Line Breaks using event and tracking data from the 2023 J1 League season. The model incorporates 189 features, including player positions, velocities, and spatial configurations, and employs an XGBoost classifier to estimate the probability of Line Breaks. The proposed model achieved high predictive accuracy, with an AUC of 0.982 and a Brier score of 0.015. Furthermore, SHAP analysis revealed that factors such as offensive player speed, gaps in the defensive line, and offensive players' spatial distributions significantly contribute to the occurrence of Line Breaks. Finally, we found a moderate positive correlation between the predicted probability of being Line-Broken and the number of shots and crosses conceded at the team level. These results suggest that Line Breaks are closely linked to the creation of scoring opportunities and provide a quantitative framework for understanding tactical dynamics in football.

Game Theory: Is Moroccan football in its Golden Era? For decades, football's talent pipeline has flowed from Africa to Europe. But Morocco is reversing that trend. Samantha Johnson looks at how Morocco's football ecosystem can challenge football's traditional hierarchy. What's behind bans on away fans?

Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.

WIRED went to Brazil for YouTube's first live NFL broadcast. It was helmed by the platform's biggest influencers as the league expands its quest for global domination. Kay Adams, Deestroying, haleyybaylee, and Cam Newton at YouTube's first live NFL broadcast. The first international game of the National Football League season, a Friday-night tilt between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers in São Paulo, is celebrated on the ground by the usual pomp and circumstance. There are photo booths and merch tents catering to local fans, samba dancers in feathered head-pieces entertaining American die-hards traveling across the equator, and a press conference where Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has to backtrack after calling association football (that is, the kind that is still most popular in Brazil, and the rest of the word) "soccer."

A rare albino deer was spotted enjoying a midnight snack from a bird feeder in a suburb of St Louis, Missouri. Albinism is observed in one in 30,000 deer, with albino deer referred to as "ghost deer," according to the Missouri Dept. of Conservation. As photos of so-called "Frankenstein" rabbits and squirrels with strange growths on their heads and bodies have started to pop up on social media, users are now sharing pictures taken of deer with bulbous warts. While the warts, or "fibromas" as they're called, may look scary, they generally don't affect the deer's health unless the growths are around the eyes and mouth, hindering their ability to see and eat and making it harder to move, according to experts. Deer fibromas are caused by an infection and are common in the U.S., the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife says on its website, adding that similar diseases affect squirrels and rabbits.