Related papers: FIFA World Cup 2022 -- The Network Edition
Transfers in professional football (soccer) are risky investments because of the large transfer fees and high risks involved. Although data-driven models can be used to improve transfer decisions, existing models focus on describing…
One of the most important and challenging problems in football is predicting future player performance when transferred to another club within and between different leagues. In addition to being the most valuable prediction a team makes, it…
This paper explores the significant history of professional football and the betting industry, tracing its evolution from clandestine beginnings to a lucrative multi-million-pound enterprise. Initiated by the legalization of gambling in…
While COVID-19 vaccines are finally becoming widely available, a second pandemic that revolves around the circulation of anti-vaxxer fake news may hinder efforts to recover from the first one. With this in mind, we performed an extensive…
This short tribute to the guru of Enumerative and Algebraic Combinatorics started out when one the authors(DZ) attended the Stanely@70 conference, that took place at the same time as the preliminary stage of the 2014 World Cup. It states a…
This paper assesses the performance of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in terms of their achievements towards becoming knowledge-based economies. This is done through a comparison against 17 benchmark countries using a four…
Corona VIrus Disease abbreviated as COVID-19 is a novel virus which is initially identified in Wuhan of China in December of 2019 and now this deadly disease has spread all over the world. According to World Health Organization (WHO), a…
We investigate the relation between the number of passes made by a football team and the number of goals. We analyze the 380 matches of a complete season of the Spanish national league "LaLiga" (2018/2019). We observe how the number of…
The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict has been a subject of intense media coverage worldwide. Understanding the global narrative surrounding this topic is crucial for researchers that aim to gain insights into its multifaceted dimensions. In…
Human trafficking is a heartless crime that represents the second most profitable crime in the world. Mexico's geographical position makes it a country with high levels of human trafficking. Using the snowball sampling method, the major…
Mexico, like the rest of the world, is currently facing the The COVID-19 pandemic. Given the size of its territory, the efforts to contain the disease have involved both national and regional measures. For this work, the curves of daily new…
Fairness has several interpretations in sports, one of them being that the rules should guarantee incentive compatibility, namely, a team cannot be worse off due to better results in any feasible scenario. The current seeding regime of the…
The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has impacted various aspects of the world from tourism, business, education, and many more. Like for every country, the global pandemic has imposed similar effects on Ghana. During this period, citizens of…
Countries globally trade with tons of waste materials every year, some of which are highly hazardous. This trade admits a network representation of the world-wide waste web, with countries as vertices and flows as directed weighted edges.…
The first Global e-Competition on Astronomy and Astrophysics was held online in September-October 2020 as a replacement for the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, which was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a public health emergency of international concern affecting more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. As of September 30, 2020, it has caused a pandemic outbreak with more than 33…
The fifth-generation (5G) mobile system is now being deployed across the world and the scale of 5G subscribers is growing quickly in many countries. The attention of academia and industry is increasingly shifting towards the sixth…
On 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, starting one of the largest military conflicts in Europe in recent years. In this paper we present preliminary findings about the impact of the conflict on the Internet performance in Ukraine and…
There is a long-standing belief that in social networks with simultaneous friendly/hostile interactions (signed networks) there is a general tendency to a global balance. Balance represents a state of the network with lack of contentious…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…