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Predicting performance outcomes has the potential to transform training approaches, inform coaching strategies, and deepen our understanding of the factors that contribute to athletic success. Traditional non-automated data analysis in…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
It is not surprise for machine learning models to provide decent prediction accuracy of soccer games outcomes based on various objective metrics. However, the performance is not that decent in terms of predicting difficult and valuable…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
Evaluating the individual movements for teammates in soccer players is crucial for assessing teamwork, scouting, and fan engagement. It has been said that players in a 90-min game do not have the ball for about 87 minutes on average.…
The paper presents a multi-camera tracking method intended for tracking soccer players in long shot video recordings from multiple calibrated cameras installed around the playing field. The large distance to the camera makes it difficult to…
Soccer scouts typically ignore the team balance and team chemistry when evaluating potential signings for their teams. Instead, they focus on the individual qualities of the players in isolation. To overcome this limitation of their…
In this work we present STEVE - Soccer TEam VEctors, a principled approach for learning real valued vectors for soccer teams where similar teams are close to each other in the resulting vector space. STEVE only relies on freely available…
Football is a very result-driven industry, with goals being rarer than in most sports, so having further parameters to judge the performance of teams and individuals is key. Expected Goals (xG) allow further insight than just a scoreline.…
Evaluating the performance of human is a common need across many applications, such as in engineering and sports. When evaluating human performance in completing complex and interactive tasks, the most common way is to use a metric having…
Sport sciences researchers talk about a relative age effect when they observe a biased distribution of elite athletes' birthdates, with an over-representation of those born at the beginning of the competitive year and an…
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
Although academic research on the 'hot hand' effect (in particular, in sports, especially in basketball) has been going on for more than 30 years, it still remains a central question in different areas of research whether such an effect…
Machine learning models have become increasingly popular for predicting the results of soccer matches, however, the lack of publicly-available benchmark datasets has made model evaluation challenging. The 2023 Soccer Prediction Challenge…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
Football (soccer) is a sport that is characterised by complex game play, where players perform a variety of actions, such as passes, shots, tackles, fouls, in order to score goals, and ultimately win matches. Accurately forecasting the…
We propose utilizing match-level suspense and surprise - which capture the entertainment utility created by competitive balance and outcome uncertainty for sports spectators - as alternative policy targets for league organizers and…
In the pursuit of natural language understanding, there has been a long standing interest in tracking state changes throughout narratives. Impressive progress has been made in modeling the state of transaction-centric dialogues and…
In fluid team sports such as soccer and basketball, analyzing team formation is one of the most intuitive ways to understand tactics from domain participants' point of view. However, existing approaches either assume that team formation is…
Competitive balance in a football league is extremely important from the perspective of economic growth of the industry. Many researchers have earlier proposed different measures of competitive balance, which are primarily adapted from the…