Related papers: FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward
We analyze how coaching strategies affect goal difference and home win probabilities using hand-coded Serie A match commentary (2011/12--2013/14). Our dataset captures in-game dynamics, referee actions, and team behavior. Applying…
Competitive balance in a football league is extremely important from the perspective of economic growth of the industry. Many researchers have earlier proposed different measures of competitive balance, which are primarily adapted from the…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…
Given the importance of accurate team rankings in American college football (CFB) -- due to heavy title and playoff implications -- strides have been made to improve evaluation metrics across statistical categories, going from basic…
Ranking a vector of alternatives on the basis of a series of paired comparisons is a relevant topic in many instances. A popular example is ranking contestants in sport tournaments. To this purpose, paired comparison models such as the…
Datascouting is one of the most known data applications in professional sport, and specifically football. Its objective is to analyze huge database of players in order to detect high potentials that can be then individually considered by…
Personalized recommendations have become a common feature of modern online services, including most major e-commerce sites, media platforms and social networks. Today, due to their high practical relevance, research in the area of…
Complex interactions between two opposing agents frequently occur in domains of machine learning, game theory, and other application domains. Quantitatively analyzing the strategies involved can provide an objective basis for…
ICC's current ranking system does not adequately account for key contextual factors such as home advantage, toss impact and scheduling imbalances; leading to inconsistencies in team evaluation in Test cricket. This study develops an…
In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on the prediction of association football. Due to this, several studies have proposed different types of statistical models to predict the outcome of a football match. However, most existing…
Recently, Factorization Machines (FM) has become more and more popular for recommendation systems, due to its effectiveness in finding informative interactions between features. Usually, the weights for the interactions is learnt as a low…
Predicting outcomes in sports is important for teams, leagues, bettors, media, and fans. Given the growing amount of player tracking data, sports analytics models are increasingly utilizing spatially-derived features built upon player…
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…
In this paper we show a new technique to analyze families of rankings. In particular we focus on sports rankings and, more precisely, on soccer leagues. We consider that two teams compete when they change their relative positions in…
This paper employs a Bayesian methodology to predict the results of soccer matches in real-time. Using sequential data of various events throughout the match, we utilize a multinomial probit regression in a novel framework to estimate the…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We propose a novel algorithm that outputs the final standings of a soccer league, based on a simple dynamics that mimics a soccer tournament. In our model, a team is created with a defined potential(ability) which is updated during the…
Humans are routinely asked to evaluate the performance of other individuals, separating success from failure and affecting outcomes from science to education and sports. Yet, in many contexts, the metrics driving the human evaluation…
We want to select the best systems out of a given set of systems (or rank them) with respect to their expected performance. The systems allow random observations only and we assume that the joint observation of the systems has a…
This paper develops a general framework for stochastic modeling of goals and other events in football (soccer) matches. The events are modelled as Cox processes (doubly stochastic Poisson processes) where the event intensities may depend on…