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Twitter has been proven to be a notable source for predictive modelling on various domains such as the stock market, the dissemination of diseases or sports outcomes. However, such a study has not been conducted in football (soccer) so far.…

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…

Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…

Action spotting in soccer videos is the task of identifying the specific time when a certain key action of the game occurs. Lately, it has received a large amount of attention and powerful methods have been introduced. Action spotting…

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…

Motion prediction in soccer involves capturing complex dynamics from player and ball interactions. We present FootBots, an encoder-decoder transformer-based architecture addressing motion prediction and conditioned motion prediction through…

Over the past two decades, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been increasingly utilized for the purpose of predicting outcomes in sport. In this paper, we provide a review of studies that have used ML for predicting results in team…

In-play football forecasting models have struggled to match the accuracy of betting exchange prices, which aggregate information from many market participants. We close this gap by combining two extensions to a Weibull accelerated failure…

Estimation of football players' skills is one of the key tasks in sports analytics. This paper introduces multiple extensions to a widely used model, expected possession value (EPV), to address some key challenges such as selection problem.…

In this paper we propose a method for the optimal allocation of observations between an intrinsically explainable glass box model and a black box model. An optimal allocation being defined as one which, for any given explainability level…

With machine learning models being increasingly used to aid decision making even in high-stakes domains, there has been a growing interest in developing interpretable models. Although many supposedly interpretable models have been proposed,…

Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. 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…

In football, attacking teams attempt to break through the opponent's defensive line to create scoring opportunities. This action, known as a Line Break, is a critical indicator of offensive effectiveness and tactical performance, yet…

Evaluating the performance of human is a common need across many applications, such as in engineering and sports. When evaluating human performance in completing complex and interactive tasks, the most common way is to use a metric having…

Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…

We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…

This paper proposes a novel framework to assess individual player contributions in football, explicitly accounting for the cooperative nature of shot-ending offensive actions. By incorporating team interaction into player evaluation, it…

The forecasting of sports events is of broad interest from the applied but also from the theoretical perspective. In this work the question is addressed for the example of the German soccer Bundesliga how a theoretically optimum forecast of…

Evaluating a soccer player's performance can be challenging due to the high costs and small margins involved in recruitment decisions. Raw observational statistics further complicate an accurate individual skill assessment as they do not…