Related papers: Fixing Match-Fixing: Optimal schedules to promote …
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…
We introduce a new measure to capture fairness of a schedule in a single round robin (SRR) tournament when participants are ranked by strength. To prevent distortion of the outcome of an SRR tournament as well as to guarantee equal…
We propose a statistical framework for quantifying the importance of single events that do not provide intermediate rewards but offer implicit incentives through the reward structure at the end of a multi-event contest. Applying the…
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 sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
UEFA declares that it is committed to respecting the fundamental values of sports. However, the qualification rules of the post-2024 UEFA Champions League are shown to be unfair: a game with misaligned incentives was narrowly avoided in the…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
For the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) introduced an incomplete round-robin format in the Champions League and Europa League, replacing the traditional group stage with a single league table of all 36…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
We study the problem of scheduling asynchronous round-robin tournaments. We consider three measures of a schedule that concern the quality and fairness of a tournament. We show that the schedule generated by the well-known "circle design"…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
The chances to win a football match can be significantly increased if the right tactic is chosen and the behavior of the opposite team is well anticipated. For this reason, every professional football club employs a team of game analysts.…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
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…
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…
Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) -- due to heavy title and playoff implications -- strides have been made to improve evaluation metrics across statistical categories, going from basic…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
National teams from different continents can play against each other only in afew sports competitions. Therefore, a reasonable aim is maximising the number of intercontinental games in world cups, as done in basketball and football, in…