Greetings. The 2025 edition of the topflight rugby tournament in Uganda commenced last Saturday. The long break from URU sanctioned rugby was not without its merits; for one, the time was spent working on novel analysis tools that will be utilised covering the 2025 Uganda Rugby Premiership. In brief, I shall expound on some of the analysis methods to be employed this season.
Headline Statistics
Firstly, the commonplace statistics surrounding points scored (from tries, conversions, penalty goals and drop goals), full time score and the disciplinary record (yellow cards and red cards) will continue to be provided. The goal success rate at this point can also be classified under this category. These particular statistics are captured in the game day sheet.
Introducing Lite-Expectations
Because the goal success rate has been moved into the mainstream, judging by its extensive usage in the 2024 rugby season, this has allowed us to explore the average return per attempt at goal for kickers in local rugby. Borrowing from the expectations model utilised in football (xG, i.e., expected goal), we look at the goal success rate of a kicker vis-a-vis the points attained from his kicks, and then compute the expected points from an attempt at goal by a kicker.
Data on 101 rugby players who made an attempt at goal in both the 2023 Rugby premiership and 2024 Rugby Championship. The data covered how many kicks each player attempted in a game and how many of those kicks were successfully converted. A mean of points per attempt was computed. Rugby attempts at goal are self-weighted, as 3 points are awarded for a successful penalty goal whereas 2 points are awarded for a successful conversion. The highest expected points a player can attain is 3, i.e., for a player who converts all his penalty attempts at goal.
In the data compiled Ivan Magomu (Black Pirates) has the most attempts at goal, a combined 126 attempts across 2023 and 2024. Willy Araptai (Eagles) has the highest xP-lite, amongst players with at least 10 attempts at goal (2.53). For players to be included in the weekly progression, they must have at least 10 attempts at goal from 2023 to date.
You will be keen to note that the term "expectations-lite" will be utilised more frequently. This is due to the fact that location considerations on the field will play a limited role in the computation. However, location was considered when computing the difficulty of an attempt at goal. A total of 515 attempts at goal were studied from over 40 games in the 2024 NSRC, the 2024 Elgon Cup, the 2024 RAC, the 2024 RAR Pool B games, the 2024 NRU Premiership, the 2024 REC, the 2024 ARC and some "Tier II" tests in both the mid- and end- of year test cycles. The local games were considered to get evidence on the performance of Uganda kickers. This had to be compared with other players in rival countries that we shall potentially meet in RAC 2025. Tier II countries were considered because in my perspective I believe they are in a place we aspire to be, and their performance is of keen interest to our rugby ambitions.
From these attempts, we managed to generate the average goal success rate for 22 of the 35 zones we demarcated on the rugby pitch. A higher percentage for a particular zone indicates a higher likelihood of conversion from that zone (easier attempt), whereas a lower attempt signals a lower likelihood of conversion (difficult attempt).
This analysis will be conducted for at least one game per game week, combining the kick difficulty and the expected points for each kicker/team. The Legends Rugby Club derby between KOBs and Rhinos was the first time this kind of analysis was conducted.
Points Progression (Retrospective Expectations)
Following from the 2024 test window where the national team had 2 games without a score in the first half, the rate at which a team accumulates points is an area I thought to look into. I design a chart of how the team has accumulated its points during a game, and compare it with past performances against that same opponent.
Of the 12 teams of the 2025 Rugby premiership, 7 of them have been in the topflight since 2022 (Buffaloes, Heathens, Hippos, KOBs, Mongers, Pirates, Rhinos). Those 7 teams have played each other at least 5 times. Walukuba and Warriors have been in 2 of the 3 seasons between 2022 and 2024, and when they are added to the pool there are at least 44 fixtures where the average progression of scoring is recorded. This will be utilised to observe whether the gap has narrowed between teams, i.e., entering Saturday's fixture, KOBs had averaged 38 points per game against Rhinos, but could only manage 11 points, which could be deemed as a heavy deviation from their previous performances. By comparison, Rhinos had an average of 6.6 points in their last 5 encounters against KOBs but took the game after scoring 13 points.
This type of analysis can be conducted for several games on a game week. A subsequent blog post with the other three fixtures where this data is available will be shared by Tuesday.
Forwards Statistics
The capturing of forward specific stats is still lacking. However, we are working on templates to capture data on set pieces that could make it possible to have a weekly assessment of players' efficiency.
Ceteris. Paribus.
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