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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Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
For the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) introduced an incomplete round-robin format in the Champions League and Europa League, replacing the traditional group stage with a single league table of all 36…
The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the…
Competitive balance, which refers to the level of control teams have over a sports competition, is a crucial indicator for tournament organisers. According to previous studies, competitive balance has significantly declined in the UEFA…
Recently, UEFA changed the group stage of its international soccer competitions to an incomplete round robin tournament. Previously, teams were divided into groups, each playing a double round robin tournament with a resulting ranking…
According to recent empirical studies, the group draw of major sports tournaments can imply a high level of uncertainty, and some lucky teams enjoy an unfair advantage over the other teams. We propose a novel technique to quantify this draw…
The paper investigates the qualification for the UEFA Champions League, the most prestigious club competition in European football with respect to the theoretical property of strategy-proofness. We find that in three seasons (2015-16,…
This article presents a Bayesian implementation of a cumulative probit model to forecast the outcomes of the UEFA Champions League matches. The argument of the normal CDF involves a cut-off point, a home vs away playing effect and the…
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…
We argue for the application of bibliometric indices to quantify the long-term uncertainty of outcome in sports. The Euclidean index is proposed to reward quality over quantity, while the rectangle index can be an appropriate measure of…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
In this work, three fundamentally different machine learning models are combined to create a new, joint model for forecasting the UEFA EURO 2024. Therefore, a generalized linear model, a random forest model, and a extreme gradient boosting…
UEFA declares that it is committed to respecting the fundamental values of sports. However, the qualification rules of the post-2024 UEFA Champions League are shown to be unfair: a game with misaligned incentives was narrowly avoided in the…
Sports data has become widely available in the recent past. With the improvement of machine learning techniques, there have been attempts to use sports data to analyze not only the outcome of individual games but also to improve insights…
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…
Existing match classification models in the tournament design literature have two major limitations: a contestant is considered indifferent only if uncertain future results do never affect its prize, and competitive matches are not…
In this work we develop a new algorithm for rating of teams (or players) in one-on-one games by exploiting the observed difference of the game-points (such as goals), also known as a margin of victory (MOV). Our objective is to obtain the…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…