Related papers: Fixing Match-Fixing: Optimal schedules to promote …
This study explores strategic considerations in professional golf's Match Play format, challenging the conventional focus on individual performance. Leveraging PGA Tour data, we investigate the impact of factoring in an adversary's…
We describe a round robin scheduling problem for a competition played in two divisions, motivated by a scheduling problem brought to the second author by a local sports organisation. The first division has teams from 2n clubs, and is played…
Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the…
The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…
We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…
Competitive balance, which refers to the level of control teams have over a sports competition, is a crucial indicator for tournament organisers. According to previous studies, competitive balance has significantly declined in the UEFA…
Ranking of agents competing with each other in complex systems may lead to paradoxes according to the pre-chosen different measures. A discussion is presented on such rank-rank, similar or not, correlations based on the case of European…
Consider an actor making selection decisions using a series of classifiers, which we term a sequential screening process. The early stages filter out some applicants, and in the final stage an expensive but accurate test is applied to the…
The play-offs of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying tournament determine the last four participants in the UEFA European Championship 2020. 16 teams, which have failed to obtain a slot in the qualifying group stage, will be selected and divided…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
In this work, we compare three different modeling approaches for the scores of soccer matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002 - 2014: Poisson regression models,…
In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different…
Ranking the participants of a tournament has applications in voting, paired comparisons analysis, sports and other domains. In this paper we introduce bipartite tournaments, which model situations in which two different kinds of entity…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
Constructing a suitable schedule for sports competitions is a crucial issue in sports scheduling. The round-robin tournament is a competition adopted in many professional sports. For most round-robin tournaments, it is considered…
Every sport needs rules. Tournament design refers to the rules that determine how a tournament, a series of games between a number of competitors, is organized. This study aims to provide an overview of the tournament design literature from…
Stable matching is a fundamental area with many practical applications, such as centralised clearinghouses for school choice or job markets. Recent work has introduced the paradigm of near-feasibility in capacitated matching settings, where…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
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…
Teamwork is vital in many settings, and it is socially beneficial for teams to cooperate in some situations (``good games'') and not in others (``bad games;'' e.g., those that allow for corruption). A team's cooperation in any given game…