Related papers: Soccer: is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian …
A popular quantitative approach to evaluating player performance in sports involves comparing an observed outcome to the expected outcome ignoring player involvement, which is estimated using statistical or machine learning methods. In…
We analyse the distributions of the number of goals scored by home teams, away teams, and the total scored in the match, in domestic football games from 169 countries between 1999 and 2001. The probability density functions (PDFs) of goals…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
Humans are routinely asked to evaluate the performance of other individuals, separating success from failure and affecting outcomes from science to education and sports. Yet, in many contexts, the metrics driving the human evaluation…
In their 1993 paper 'Forecasting point and continuous processes: Prequential analysis' in Test, Vovk put forward a game-theoretic definition of the Poisson process. A key assumption therein is that the rate of the Poisson process is known…
Soccer is a sparse rewarding game: any smart or careless action in critical situations can change the result of the match. Therefore players, coaches, and scouts are all curious about the best action to be performed in critical situations,…
In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we…
A question is raised on whether some implied regularity or structure, as found in soccer team ranking by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), is due to implicit game result value or score competition conditions. The analysis…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…
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…
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…
Score matching is an estimation procedure that has been developed for statistical models whose probability density function is known up to proportionality but whose normalizing constant is intractable, so that maximum likelihood is…
This paper introduces an approach to predicting the next event in a soccer match, a challenge bearing remarkable similarities to the problem faced by Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike other methods that severely limit event dynamics in…
Measuring soccer shooting skill is a challenging analytics problem due to the scarcity and highly contextual nature of scoring events. The introduction of more advanced data surrounding soccer shots has given rise to model-based metrics…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. 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…
It is challenging to get access to datasets related to the physical performance of soccer players. The teams consider such information highly confidential, especially if it covers in-game performance.Hence, most of the analysis and…
In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on the prediction of association football. Due to this, several studies have proposed different types of statistical models to predict the outcome of a football match. However, most existing…