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Player tracking data remains out of reach for many professional football teams as their video feeds are not sufficiently high quality for computer vision technologies to be used. To help bridge this gap, we present a method that can…
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other…
The goal of the classic football-pool problem is to determine how many lottery tickets are to be bought in order to guarantee at least $n-r$ correct guesses out of a sequence of $n$ games played. We study a generalized (second-order)…
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…
American football is a leading sport for contact-related injuries such as cervical spine injuries, some of which result from an unforeseen hit. The use of a feedback mechanism to alert an athlete of a potential hit may mitigate the risk for…
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
Most historical National Football League (NFL) analysis, both mainstream and academic, has relied on public, play-level data to generate team and player comparisons. Given the number of oft omitted variables that impact on-field results,…
The objective of the present study is to present a computational model of the motion of a single athlete in a team and to compare the resulting trajectory with experimental data obtained in the field during competitions by match analysis…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
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…
American college football faces a conflict created by the desire to stage national championship games between the best teams of a season when there is no conventional playoff system to decide which those teams are. Instead, ranking of teams…
Pressing is a fundamental defensive strategy in football, characterized by applying pressure on the ball owning team to regain possession. Despite its significance, existing metrics for measuring pressing often lack precision or…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
Orientation is a crucial skill for football players that becomes a differential factor in a large set of events, especially the ones involving passes. However, existing orientation estimation methods, which are based on computer-vision…
The purpose of this research is to create a machine learning-based smart coaching approach for football that can replace manual analysis with real-time feedback for trainers. In-depth analysis of football player data by humans is…
A defender dispatches patrollers to circumambulate a perimeter to guard against potential attacks. The defender decides on the time points to dispatch patrollers and each patroller's direction and speed, as long as the long-run rate…
The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorem for search and optimisation states that averaged across all possible objective functions on a fixed search space, all search algorithms perform equally well. Several refined versions of the theorem find a…
We investigate the relation between the number of passes made by a football team and the number of goals. We analyze the 380 matches of a complete season of the Spanish national league "LaLiga" (2018/2019). We observe how the number of…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…