Related papers: Robust analysis of second-leg home advantage in UE…
Since March 2020, the environment surrounding football has changed dramatically because of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a few months' break, re-scheduled matches were held behind closed doors without spectators. The main objective of this…
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 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…
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…
Home advantage (HA) in football, soccer is well documented in the literature; however, the explanation for such phenomenon is yet to be completed, as this paper demonstrates that it is possible to overcome such disadvantage through…
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…
We analyze how coaching strategies affect goal difference and home win probabilities using hand-coded Serie A match commentary (2011/12--2013/14). Our dataset captures in-game dynamics, referee actions, and team behavior. Applying…
Forecast of football outcomes in terms of Home Win, Draw and Away Win relies largely on ex ante probability elicitation of these events and ex post verification of them via computation of probability scoring rules (Brier, Ranked…
This article presents a Bayesian implementation of a cumulative probit model to forecast the outcomes of the UEFA Champions League matches. The argument of the normal CDF involves a cut-off point, a home vs away playing effect and the…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
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…
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…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
Penalty shootouts play a crucial role in the knockout stage of major football tournaments. Their importance has substantially increased from the 2021/22 season, when the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) scrapped the away goals…
In sports analytics, home field advantage is a robust phenomenon where the home team wins more games than the away team. However, discovering the causal factors behind home field advantage presents unique challenges due to the…
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…
In this work we study the ranking algorithm used by F\'ed\'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); we analyze the parameters it currently uses, show the formal probabilistic model from which it can be derived, and optimize…
In this work, we extended a stochastic model for football leagues based on the team's potential [R. da Silva et al. Comput. Phys. Commun. \textbf{184} 661--670 (2013)] for making predictions instead of only performing a successful…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
It is well-established that the home advantage (HA), the phenomenon that on average the local team performs better than the visiting team, exists in many sports. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, spectators were banned from football…