Related papers: Fitness, chance, and myths: an objective view on s…

We analyze the results of the German Team Handball Bundesliga for ten seasons in a model-free statistical time series approach. We will show that the home advantage is nearly negligible compared to the total sum of goals. Specific interest…

The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…

The forecasting of sports events is of broad interest from the applied but also from the theoretical perspective. In this work the question is addressed for the example of the German soccer Bundesliga how a theoretically optimum forecast of…

Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…

We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…

In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…

Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…

The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…

Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…

A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…

Competitive balance in a football league is extremely important from the perspective of economic growth of the industry. Many researchers have earlier proposed different measures of competitive balance, which are primarily adapted from the…

A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…

We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…

We modeled the dynamics of a soccer match based on a network representation where players are nodes discretely clustered into homogeneous groups. Players were grouped by physical proximity, supported by the intuitive notion that competing…

In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…

In international football (soccer), two-legged knockout ties, with each team playing at home in one leg and the final outcome decided on aggregate, are common. Many players, managers and followers seem to believe in the `second-leg home…

Managerial decision making is likely to be a dominant determinant of performance of teams in team sports. Here we use Japanese and German football data to investigate correlates between temporal patterns of formation changes across matches…

Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals for…

Scoring goals in a soccer match can be interpreted as a stochastic process. In the most simple description of a soccer match one assumes that scoring goals can be described by a constant goal rate for each team, implying simple Poissonian…

Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. It turns out…