Related papers: UEFA EURO 2020 Forecast via Nested Zero-Inflated G…
The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the…
Forecasting sporting events encapsulate a compelling intellectual endeavor, underscored by the substantial financial activity of an estimated $80 billion wagered in global sports betting during 2022, a trend that grows yearly. Motivated by…
In this work, we compare several different modeling approaches for count data applied to the scores of handball matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous IHF World Men's Handball…
In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes…
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…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
We consider the task of determining a football player's ability for a given event type, for example, scoring a goal. We propose an interpretable Bayesian model which is fit using variational inference methods. We implement a Poisson model…
This article presents a holistic compound Poisson regression model framework to forecast number of corner kicks taken in association football. Corner kick taken events are often decisive in the match outcome and inherently arrive in batch…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
We analyse the distributions of the number of goals scored by home teams, away teams, and the total scored in the match, in domestic football games from 169 countries between 1999 and 2001. The probability density functions (PDFs) of goals…
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…
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…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
Starting in the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…