Related papers: A time-dependent scoring system for soccer leagues
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…
In this paper, we present a novel sequential team selection model in soccer. Specifically, we model the stochastic process of player injury and unavailability using player-specific information learned from real-world soccer data.…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
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 study proposes a statistically grounded framework for real-time win probability evaluation and player assessment in score-based team sports, based on minute-by-minute cumulative box-score data. We introduce a continuous dominance…
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the…
Scientifically evaluating soccer players represents a challenging Machine Learning problem. Unfortunately, most existing answers have very opaque algorithm training procedures; relevant data are scarcely accessible and almost impossible to…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be…
Inspired by applications in sports where the skill of players or teams competing against each other varies over time, we propose a probabilistic model of pairwise-comparison outcomes that can capture a wide range of time dynamics. We…
We introduce the model of line-up elections which captures parallel or sequential single-winner elections with a shared candidate pool. The goal of a line-up election is to find a high-quality assignment of a set of candidates to a set of…
In soccer games, the goalkeeper's performance is an important factor to the success of the whole team. Despite the goalkeeper's importance, little attention has been paid to their performance in events and tracking data. Here, we developed…
Recently, UEFA changed the group stage of its international soccer competitions to an incomplete round robin tournament. Previously, teams were divided into groups, each playing a double round robin tournament with a resulting ranking…
Modelling football outcomes has gained increasing attention, in large part due to the potential for making substantial profits. Despite the strong connection existing between football models and the bookmakers' betting odds, no authors have…
We describe a contest in variable selection which was part of a statistics course for graduate students. In particular, the possibility to create a contest themselves offered an additional challenge for more advanced students. Since working…
We propose a foundation model for soccer, which is able to predict subsequent actions in a soccer match from a given input sequence of actions. As a proof of concept, we train a transformer architecture on three seasons of data from a…
We present a (semi)-algorithm to compute winning strategies for parametric timed games. Previous algorithms only synthesized constraints on the clock parameters for which the game is winning. A new definition of (winning) strategies is…
Sports data has become widely available in the recent past. With the improvement of machine learning techniques, there have been attempts to use sports data to analyze not only the outcome of individual games but also to improve insights…