Related papers: FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward
In this article we revise the football's performance score called PlayeRank, designed and evaluated by Pappalardo et al.\ in 2019. First, we analyze the weights extracted from the Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) that solves the…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
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…
We showcase in this paper the use of some tools from network theory to describe the strategy of football teams. Using passing data made available by FIFA during the 2010 World Cup, we construct for each team a weighted and directed network…
Game theory has been increasingly applied in settings where the game is not known outright, but has to be estimated by sampling. For example, meta-games that arise in multi-agent evaluation can only be accessed by running a succession of…
Forecast of football outcomes in terms of Home Win, Draw and Away Win relies largely on ex ante probability elicitation of these events and ex post verification of them via computation of probability scoring rules (Brier, Ranked…
This article is devoted to the forecast of the FIFA World Cup 2022 via nested zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression. Our regression model incorporates the Elo points of the participating teams, the location of the matches and the of…
In basketball and hockey, state-of-the-art player value statistics are often variants of Adjusted Plus-Minus (APM). But APM hasn't had the same impact in soccer, since soccer games are low scoring with a low number of substitutions. In…
In this work we develop a new algorithm for rating of teams (or players) in one-on-one games by exploiting the observed difference of the game-points (such as goals), also known as a margin of victory (MOV). Our objective is to obtain the…
This paper presents some useful mathematical results involved in football table prediction. In addition, some empirical results indicate that an alternative methodology for football table prediction may produce high quality forecasts with…
The integrity of a sport can be seriously undermined if its rules punish winning as this creates incentives for strategic manipulation. Therefore, a sports tournament can be called unfair if the overall win probabilities are not ordered…
With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
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…
We present ten different strength-based statistical models that we use to model soccer match outcomes with the aim of producing a new ranking. The models are of four main types: Thurstone-Mosteller, Bradley-Terry, Independent Poisson and…
In this work, we combine two different ranking methods together with several other predictors in a joint random forest approach for the scores of soccer matches. The first ranking method is based on the bookmaker consensus, the second…
In most sports, especially football, most coaches and analysts search for key performance indicators using notational analysis. This method utilizes a statistical summary of events based on video footage and numerical records of goal…
Most accurate predictions are typically obtained by learning machines with complex feature spaces (as e.g. induced by kernels). Unfortunately, such decision rules are hardly accessible to humans and cannot easily be used to gain insights…