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In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
We use the fertile ground of betting markets to study the anticipation of major news in financial markets. While there is a considerable body of literature on the accuracy and efficiency of betting markets after important in-match events,…
The paper presents a plus-minus rating for use in association football (soccer). We first describe the standard plus-minus methodology as used in basketball and ice-hockey and then adapt it for use in soccer. The usual goal-differential…
Forecasting sporting events encapsulate a compelling intellectual endeavor, underscored by the substantial financial activity of an estimated $80 billion wagered in global sports betting during 2022, a trend that grows yearly. Motivated by…
Several performance metrics for quantifying the in-game performances of individual football players have been proposed in recent years. Although the majority of the on-the-ball actions during games constitutes of passes, many of the…
In recent years, many different approaches have been proposed to quantify the performances of soccer players. Since player performances are challenging to quantify directly due to the low-scoring nature of soccer, most approaches estimate…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
The expected goal provides a more representative measure of the team and player performance which also suit the low-scoring nature of football instead of score in modern football. The score of a match involves randomness and often may not…
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…
Accurate prediction of FIFA World Cup match outcomes holds significant value for analysts, coaches, bettors, and fans. This paper presents a machine learning framework specifically designed to forecast match winners in FIFA World Cup. By…
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…
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the…
The FIFA Men's World Cup Tournament (WCT) is the most important football (soccer) competition, attracting worldwide attention. A popular practice among football fans in Brazil is to organize contests in which each participant informs…
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…