On the time of corner kicks in soccer: an analysis of event history data

To understand the patterns of times to corner kicks in soccer and how they are associated with a few important factors, we analyze the corner kick records from the 2019 regular season of the Chinese Super League. This paper is particularly concerned with the elapsed time to a corner kick from a natural starting point. We overcome 2 challenges arising from such time-to-event analyses, which have not been discussed in the sports analytics literature. The first is that observations of times to corner kicks are subject to right-censoring. A given soccer starting point rarely ends with a corner kick but the occurrence of a different terminal event. The second issue is the mixture feature of short and typical gap times to the next corner kick from a particular one. There is often a subsequent corner kick quickly following a corner kick. The conventional event time models are thus inappropriate for formulating distributions of corner kick times. Our analysis reveals how the timing of corner kicks is associated with the factors of first versus second half of the game, home versus away team, score differential, betting odds prior to the game, and red card differential. We present applications of the developed statistical model for prediction to support tactics and sports betting.