Related papers: FIFA World Cup 2022 -- The Network Edition
Due to the unfavourable climatic conditions in Qatar during summertime, the FIFA World Cup 2022 will be played during on-going seasons of the major European leagues. This study investigates how national teams' tournaments scheduled at such…
FIFA World Cup is one of the most watched sporting event in the world and its popularity continue to increase. While currently 32 teams participate in this event, starting with 2026 the number of participants will increase to 48. As a…
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…
This paper investigates the fairness of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifying competition via Monte Carlo simulations. The qualifying probabilities are calculated for 102 nations, all teams except for African and European countries. A method…
Qualifications for several world championships in sports are organised such that distinct sets of teams play in their own tournament for a predetermined number of slots. Inspired by a recent work studying the problem with the tools from the…
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…
The usual FIFA World Cup-TM group stage format is eight groups of four teams for a total of 32 teams. The top two teams from each group advance to the next round, resulting in a 16-team knockout stage. The next edition of the World Cup will…
Public digital conversation around major sporting events takes place within a hybrid system in which journalists and the media compete with new intermediaries, including influencers, to gain greater visibility and engage with audiences.…
In this study, we conducted a comprehensive data collection on the 2022 Qatar FIFA World Cup event and used a multilayer network approach to visualize the main topics, while considering their context and meaning relationships. We structured…
Twitter is a social media platform bridging most countries and allows real-time news discovery. Since the tweets on Twitter are usually short and express public feelings, thus provide a source for opinion mining and sentiment analysis for…
A match played in a sports tournament can be called stakeless if at least one team is indifferent to its outcome because it already has qualified or has been eliminated. Such a game threatens fairness since teams may not exert full effort…
I present a double-elimination format for the 48-team FIFA World Cup that solves many of the concerns raised about the considered formats with mixed round-robin with groups of 3 or 4 teams and single-elimination strategies. Using a…
We designed a multilayer perceptron neural network to predict the price of a football (soccer) player using data on more than 15,000 players from the football simulation video game FIFA 2017. The network was optimized by experimenting with…
Forecasting sporting events encapsulate a compelling intellectual endeavor, underscored by the substantial financial activity of an estimated $80 billion wagered in global sports betting during 2022, a trend that grows yearly. Motivated by…
This article is devoted to the forecast of the FIFA World Cup 2022 via nested zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression. Our regression model incorporates the Elo points of the participating teams, the location of the matches and the of…
Accurate prediction of FIFA World Cup match outcomes holds significant value for analysts, coaches, bettors, and fans. This paper presents a machine learning framework specifically designed to forecast match winners in FIFA World Cup. By…
The transfer of football players is an important part in football games. Most studies on the transfer of football players focus on the transfer system and transfer fees but not on the transfer behavior itself. Based on the 470,792 transfer…
On the occasion of the last FIFA World Cup in Brazil, The Economist published a plot depicting how many goals have been scored in all World Cup competitions until present, minute by minute. The plot was followed by a naive and poorly…
Although being a very popular sport in many countries, soccer has not received much attention from the scientific community. In this paper, we study soccer from a complex network point of view. First, we consider a bipartite network with…
The play-offs of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying tournament determine the last four participants in the UEFA European Championship 2020. 16 teams, which have failed to obtain a slot in the qualifying group stage, will be selected and divided…