Related papers: FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward
We describe a formal correctness proof of RANKING, an online algorithm for online bipartite matching. An outcome of our formalisation is that it shows that there is a gap in all combinatorial proofs of the algorithm. Filling that gap…
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Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
Soccer attracts the attention of many researchers and professionals in the sports industry. Therefore, the incorporation of science into the sport is constantly growing, with increasing investments in performance analysis and sports…
We consider the task of determining the number of chances a soccer team creates, along with the composite nature of each chance-the players involved and the locations on the pitch of the assist and the chance. We propose an interpretable…
This article presents a Bayesian implementation of a cumulative probit model to forecast the outcomes of the UEFA Champions League matches. The argument of the normal CDF involves a cut-off point, a home vs away playing effect and the…
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…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
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…
In this paper we bring a novel approach to the theory of tournament rankings. We combine two different theories that are widely used to establish rankings of populations after a given tournament. First, we use the statistical approach of…
Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate reinforcements,…
The success of a football team depends on various individual skills and performances of the selected players as well as how cohesively they perform. We propose a two-stage process for selecting optimal playing eleven of a football team from…
This paper presents a new framework for player valuation in European football, by fusing principles from financial mathematics and network theory. The valuation model leverages a "passing matrix" to encapsulate player interactions on the…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
The purpose of this article is to introduce a new analytical framework dedicated to measuring performance of recommender systems. The standard approach is to assess the quality of a system by means of accuracy related statistics. However,…
Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the…
Algorithmic decision systems are increasingly used in areas such as hiring, school admission, or loan approval. Typically, these systems rely on labeled data for training a classification model. However, in many scenarios, ground-truth…
In international football (soccer), two-legged knockout ties, with each team playing at home in one leg and the final outcome decided on aggregate, are common. Many players, managers and followers seem to believe in the `second-leg home…
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…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…
In this paper, we present betting strategy of a football game using probability theory. We know all betting houses offer slightly unfair odds towards the player. Here we discuss a simple way to figure out which betting house is offering…