Related papers: Plus-Minus Player Ratings for Soccer
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…
In soccer (or association football), players quickly go from heroes to zeroes, or vice-versa. Performance is not a static measure but a somewhat volatile one. Analyzing performance as a time series rather than a stationary point in time is…
In soccer, contextual player performance metrics are invaluable to coaches. For example, the ability to perform under pressure during matches distinguishes the elite from the average. Appropriate pressure metric enables teams to assess…
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…
The forecasting of sports events is of broad interest from the applied but also from the theoretical perspective. In this work the question is addressed for the example of the German soccer Bundesliga how a theoretically optimum forecast of…
The English Premier League is well-known for being not only one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the world, but also one of the toughest competitions to predict. The first purpose of this research was to verify 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…
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…
This paper aims to reduce randomness in football by analysing the role of lineups in final scores using machine learning prediction models we have developed. Football clubs invest millions of dollars on lineups and knowing how individual…
Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…
This paper presents a new framework for player valuation in European football, by fusing principles from financial mathematics and network theory. The valuation model leverages a "passing matrix" to encapsulate player interactions on the…
We undertake extensive analysis of English Premier League data over the period 2009/10 to 2017/18 to identify and rank key factors affecting the economic and footballing performances of the teams. Alternative end-of-season league tables are…
We present ten different strength-based statistical models that we use to model soccer match outcomes with the aim of producing a new ranking. The models are of four main types: Thurstone-Mosteller, Bradley-Terry, Independent Poisson and…
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 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…
This note proposes a penalty criterion for assessing correct score forecasting in a soccer match. The penalty is based on hierarchical priorities for such a forecast i.e., i) Win, Draw and Loss exact prediction and ii) normalized Euclidian…
In this paper, we present betting strategy of a football game using probability theory. We know all betting houses offer slightly unfair odds towards the player. Here we discuss a simple way to figure out which betting house is offering…
In most sports, especially football, most coaches and analysts search for key performance indicators using notational analysis. This method utilizes a statistical summary of events based on video footage and numerical records of goal…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
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…