Related papers: FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward
The draw for the 2022 FIFA World Cup has been organised before the identity of three winners of the play-offs is revealed. Seeding has been based on the FIFA World Ranking released on 31 March 2022 but these three teams have been drawn from…
Scientifically evaluating soccer players represents a challenging Machine Learning problem. Unfortunately, most existing answers have very opaque algorithm training procedures; relevant data are scarcely accessible and almost impossible to…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals 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…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
This paper considers a problem of planning an attack in robotic football (RoboCup). The problem is reduced to finding a trajectory of the ball from its current position to the opponents goals. Heuristic search algorithm, i.e. A*, is used to…
We developed an artificial intelligence approach to predict the transfer fee of a football player. This model can help clubs make better decisions about which players to buy and sell, which can lead to improved performance and increased…
A common way of doing algorithm selection is to train a machine learning model and predict the best algorithm from a portfolio to solve a particular problem. While this method has been highly successful, choosing only a single algorithm has…
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…
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…
Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms an integral part…
This article is devoted to the forecast of the Africa Cup of Nations 2019 football tournament. It is based on a Poisson regression model that includes the Elo points of the participating teams as covariates and incorporates differences of…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
Fairness has emerged as an important consideration in algorithmic decision-making. Unfairness occurs when an agent with higher merit obtains a worse outcome than an agent with lower merit. Our central point is that a primary cause of…
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…
Tournament organisers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort. However, the European qualification tournaments for recent FIFA soccer World Cups are known to violate this…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
Accurately predicting the outcome of sporting events has been a goal for many groups who seek to maximize profit. What makes this challenging is that the outcome of an event can be influenced by many factors that dynamically change across…