Related papers: Why winning a soccer game is worth 5 points
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
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…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
The paper presents a plus-minus rating for use in association football (soccer). We first describe the standard plus-minus methodology as used in basketball and ice-hockey and then adapt it for use in soccer. The usual goal-differential…
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…
In this paper we bring a novel approach to the theory of tournament rankings. We combine two different theories that are widely used to establish rankings of populations after a given tournament. First, we use the statistical approach of…
This note proposes a penalty criterion for assessing correct score forecasting in a soccer match. The penalty is based on hierarchical priorities for such a forecast i.e., i) Win, Draw and Loss exact prediction and ii) normalized Euclidian…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
In this work we study the ranking algorithm used by F\'ed\'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); we analyze the parameters it currently uses, show the formal probabilistic model from which it can be derived, and optimize…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Soccer is undeniably the most popular sport world-wide and everyone from general managers and coaching staff to fans and media are interested in evaluating players' performance. Metrics applied successfully in other sports, such as the…
In this paper, we examine team ball sports to investigate how the likelihood of weaker teams winning against stronger ones, referred to as underdog achievement, is influenced by inherent randomness factors that affect match outcomes in such…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Ranking individuals based on their performance in different coalitions is a problem emerging in various domains (teams sports, scientific evaluation, argumentation, etc.). Often, for practical reasons, the number of comparable coalitions is…
American college football faces a conflict created by the desire to stage national championship games between the best teams of a season when there is no conventional playoff system to decide which those teams are. Instead, ranking of teams…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…