Related papers: A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA Wor…
With an exploding global market and the recent introduction of online cash prize tournaments, fantasy sports contests are quickly becoming a central part of the social gaming and sports industries. For sports fans and online media…
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…
The Swiss-system is an increasingly popular competition format as it provides a favourable trade-off between the number of matches and ranking accuracy. However, there is no empirical study on the potential unfairness of Swiss-system chess…
The Football World Cup as world's favorite sporting event is a source of both entertainment and overwhelming amount of data about the games played. In this paper we analyse the available data on football world championships since 1930 until…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
A novel long-lived distributed problem, called Team Formation (TF), is introduced together with a message- and time-efficient randomized algorithm. The problem is defined over the asynchronous model with a complete communication graph,…
The goal of group formation is to build a team to accomplish a specific task. Algorithms are employed to improve the effectiveness of the team so formed and the efficiency of the group selection process. However, there is concern that team…
Sports league scheduling is a difficult task in the general case. In this short note, we report two improvements to an existing enumerative search algorithm for a NP-hard sports league scheduling problem known as "prob026" in CSPLib. These…
Despite the many recent practical and theoretical breakthroughs in computational game theory, equilibrium finding in extensive-form team games remains a significant challenge. While NP-hard in the worst case, there are provably efficient…
This paper proposes a cluster-based method to analyze the evolution of multivariate time series and applies this to the COVID-19 pandemic. On each day, we partition countries into clusters according to both their case and death counts. The…
We analyse football (soccer) player performance data with mixed type variables from the 2014-15 season of eight European major leagues. We cluster these data based on a tailor-made dissimilarity measure. In order to decide between the many…
Three state-of-the-art statistical ranking methods for forecasting football matches are combined with several other predictors in a hybrid machine learning model. Namely an ability estimate for every team based on historic matches; an…
In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…
The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) addresses inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two $n$-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of…
We investigate the computation of equilibria in extensive-form games where ex ante correlation is possible, focusing on correlated equilibria requiring the least amount of communication between the players and the mediator. Motivated by the…
We explore the advantages of representing international football results as a directed network in order to give each team a rank. Two network-based models --- Static and Dynamic --- are constructed and compared with the FIFA Rankings. The…
Ranking the participants of a tournament has applications in voting, paired comparisons analysis, sports and other domains. In this paper we introduce bipartite tournaments, which model situations in which two different kinds of entity…
A single-elimination (SE) tournament is a popular way to select a winner in both sports competitions and in elections. A natural and well-studied question is the tournament fixing problem (TFP): given the set of all pairwise match outcomes,…
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…
Since March 2020, the environment surrounding football has changed dramatically because of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a few months' break, re-scheduled matches were held behind closed doors without spectators. The main objective of this…