Related papers: FIFA World Cup 2022 -- The Network Edition
The organisers of major sports competitions use different policies with respect to constraints in the group draw. Our paper aims to rationalise these choices by analysing the trade-off between attractiveness (the number of games played by…
In many societies alcohol is a legal and common recreational substance and socially accepted. Alcohol consumption often comes along with social events as it helps people to increase their sociability and to overcome their inhibitions. On…
Starting in the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
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…
Analyzing defenses in team sports is generally challenging because of the limited event data. Researchers have previously proposed methods to evaluate football team defense by predicting the events of ball gain and being attacked using…
The FIFA Men's World Cup Tournament (WCT) is the most important football (soccer) competition, attracting worldwide attention. A popular practice among football fans in Brazil is to organize contests in which each participant informs…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
Several sports tournaments contain a round-robin group stage where the teams are assigned to groups subject to some constraints. Hence, the organisers usually use a computer-assisted random draw to avoid any dead end, a situation when the…
Classification of matches played in the last rounds of sports competitions is a well-established tool for evaluating tournament designs. Both deterministic and probabilistic approaches are available for this purpose. Our paper offers the…
Multi-stage tournaments consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout phase are ubiquitous in sports. However, this format is incentive incompatible if at least two teams from a group advance to the knockout stage where the…
In the last round of the FIFA World Cup group stage, games for which the outcome does not affect the selection of the qualified teams are played with little enthusiasm. Furthermore, a team that has already qualified may take into account…
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…
The FIFA World Cup in Qatar was discussed extensively in the news and on social media. Due to news reports with allegations of human rights violations, there were calls to boycott it. Wearing a OneLove armband was part of a planned protest…
We analyze the pass network among the players of the Spanish team (the world champion in the FIFA World Cup 2010), with the objective of explaining the results obtained from the behavior at the complex network level. The team is considered…
Existing estimates of human migration are limited in their scope, reliability, and timeliness, prompting the United Nations and the Global Compact on Migration to call for improved data collection. Using privacy protected records from three…
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…
Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in the prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes, with particular emphasis placed on this area by the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In this…
The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) distributes commercial revenue from its club competitions according to a complex mechanism. Coefficient-based amounts are paid such that the participating teams are ranked on the basis of…
As the most popular sport around the globe, the game of football has recently intrigued much research interest to explore and distill useful and appealing information from the sport. Network science and graph-centric methods have been…