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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…
We develop the fictitious play algorithm in the context of the linear programming approach for mean field games of optimal stopping and mean field games with regular control and absorption. This algorithm allows to approximate the mean…
This study developed a new explainable artificial intelligence algorithm called PassAI, which classifies successful or failed passes in a soccer game and explains its rationale using both tracking and passer's seasonal stats information.…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
Pursuit-evasion scenarios appear widely in robotics, security domains, and many other real-world situations. We focus on two-player pursuit-evasion games with concurrent moves, infinite horizon, and discounted rewards. We assume that the…
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…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
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…
Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, yet systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change remains sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,018 matches across ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in…
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…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
We show how the necessary and sufficient conditions for the NFL to apply can be reduced to the single requirement of the set of objective functions under consideration being closed under permutation, and quantify the extent to which a set…
As 3-point shooting in the NBA continues to increase, the importance of perimeter defense has never been greater. Perimeter defenders are often evaluated by their ability to tightly contest shots, but how exactly does contesting a jump shot…
As the most popular sport around the globe, the game of football has recently intrigued much research interest to explore and distill useful and appealing information from the sport. Network science and graph-centric methods have been…
American football games attract significant worldwide attention every year. Identifying players from videos in each play is also essential for the indexing of player participation. Processing football game video presents great challenges…
The Football World Cup as world's favorite sporting event is a source of both entertainment and overwhelming amount of data about the games played. In this paper we analyse the available data on football world championships since 1930 until…
A team of association football players may be envisioned as a directed network with player nodes and weighted pass edges. Such a simplistic representation of an otherwise complex structure yields several benefits, but also permits the…
The sharpened No-Free-Lunch-theorem (NFL-theorem) states that the performance of all optimization algorithms averaged over any finite set F of functions is equal if and only if F is closed under permutation (c.u.p.) and each target function…
This study analyzes pass networks in football (soccer) using a stochastic model known as the P\'olya urn. By focusing on preferential selection, it theoretically demonstrates that the time evolution of networks can be characterized by a…