Related papers: Soccer matches as experiments: how often does the …
We investigate the relation between the number of passes made by a football team and the number of goals. We analyze the 380 matches of a complete season of the Spanish national league "LaLiga" (2018/2019). We observe how the number of…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
In the domain of the Soccer simulation 2D league of the RoboCup project, appropriate player positioning against a given opponent team is an important factor of soccer team performance. This work proposes a model which decides the strategy…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
Probabilistic properties of tennis scoring systems are examined and compared with best-of-K systems. A model, where each player has his/her own probability of winning his/her service point and which remains invariant for the duration of the…
Expected goals (xG) models estimate the probability that a shot results in a goal from its context (e.g., location, pressure), but they operate only on observed shots. We propose xG+, a possession-level framework that first estimates the…
In soccer, passing is the most frequent interaction between players and plays a significant role in creating scoring chances. Experts are interested in analyzing players' passing behavior to learn passing tactics, i.e., how players build up…
With the increasingly detailed investigation of game play and tactics in invasive team sports such as soccer, it becomes ever more important to present causes, actions and findings in a meaningful manner. Visualizations, especially when…
Technology offers new ways to measure the locations of the players and of the ball in sports. This translates to the trajectories the ball takes on the field as a result of the tactics the team applies. The challenge professionals in soccer…
We propose two Bayesian multinomial-Dirichlet models to predict the final outcome of football (soccer) matches and compare them to three well-known models regarding their predictive power. All the models predicted the full-time results of…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
Two-player zero-sum repeated games are well understood. Computing the value of such a game is straightforward. Additionally, if the payoffs are dependent on a random state of the game known to one, both, or neither of the players, the…
In wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2019-2020 soccer seasons across the world were postponed and eventually made up during the summer months of 2020. Researchers from a variety of disciplines jumped at the opportunity to compare the…
A knowledgeable observer of a game of football (soccer) can make a subjective evaluation of the quality of passes made between players during the game. We investigate the problem of producing an automated system to make the same evaluation…
In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different…
In the pursuit of natural language understanding, there has been a long standing interest in tracking state changes throughout narratives. Impressive progress has been made in modeling the state of transaction-centric dialogues and…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…