Related papers: Soccer: is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian …
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
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 this paper we present a novel approach to optimise tactical and strategic decision making in football (soccer). We model the game of football as a multi-stage game which is made up from a Bayesian game to model the pre-match decisions…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
This paper employs a Bayesian methodology to predict the results of soccer matches in real-time. Using sequential data of various events throughout the match, we utilize a multinomial probit regression in a novel framework to estimate the…
Machine learning has become a common approach to predicting the outcomes of soccer matches, and the body of literature in this domain has grown substantially in the past decade and a half. This chapter discusses available datasets, the…
Assessing the impact of the individual actions performed by soccer players during games is a crucial aspect of the player recruitment process. Unfortunately, most traditional metrics fall short in addressing this task as they either focus…
In this work, we draw attention to a connection between skill-based models of game outcomes and Gaussian process classification models. The Gaussian process perspective enables a) a principled way of dealing with uncertainty and b) rich…
We present a new approach for identifying situations and behaviours, which we call "moves", from soccer games in the 2D simulation league. Being able to identify key situations and behaviours are useful capabilities for analysing soccer…
Given a monocular video of a soccer match, this paper presents a computational model to estimate the most feasible pass at any given time. The method leverages offensive player's orientation (plus their location) and opponents' spatial…
The expected possession value (EPV) of a soccer possession represents the likelihood of a team scoring or receiving the next goal at any time instance. By decomposing the EPV into a series of subcomponents that are estimated separately, we…
We compare various extensions of the Bradley-Terry model and a hierarchical Poisson log-linear model in terms of their performance in predicting the outcome of soccer matches (win, draw, or loss). The parameters of the Bradley-Terry…
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…
This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of semantic parsing via learning the correspondences between complex sentences and rich sets of events. Our main intuition is that correct correspondences tend to occur more frequently.…
Evaluating the individual movements for teammates in soccer players is crucial for assessing teamwork, scouting, and fan engagement. It has been said that players in a 90-min game do not have the ball for about 87 minutes on average.…
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…
We present a framework that gives a deep insight into the link between physical and technical-tactical aspects of soccer and it allows associating physical performance with value generation thanks to a top-down approach. First, we estimate…
Ranking is used in sport leagues to determine a champion and/or to decide on promotion/relegation of teams. Arguably, the best known ranking method relies on scores obtained by cumulating the points associated with the wins and the draws of…
We propose a novel algorithm that outputs the final standings of a soccer league, based on a simple dynamics that mimics a soccer tournament. In our model, a team is created with a defined potential(ability) which is updated during the…
In this work, we compare three different modeling approaches for the scores of soccer matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002 - 2014: Poisson regression models,…