Related papers: Evaluating Competitiveness in UEFA's New Champions…
Ranking of agents competing with each other in complex systems may lead to paradoxes according to the pre-chosen different measures. A discussion is presented on such rank-rank, similar or not, correlations based on the case of European…
FIFA World Cup is one of the most watched sporting event in the world and its popularity continue to increase. While currently 32 teams participate in this event, starting with 2026 the number of participants will increase to 48. As a…
Tournament organisers supposedly design rules such that a team cannot be strictly better off by exerting a lower effort. However, the European qualification tournaments for recent FIFA soccer World Cups are known to violate this…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
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…
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…
The play-offs of the UEFA Euro 2020 qualifying tournament determine the last four participants in the UEFA European Championship 2020. 16 teams, which have failed to obtain a slot in the qualifying group stage, will be selected and divided…
One of the most serious violations of fairness in sports is when a team has clear incentives to lose a match, which hurt a third, innocent team. This is shown to be not only a theoretical possibility as the recently identified incentive…
A paper published in a leading journal of management science has recently analysed the mechanism used for the UEFA Champions League Round of 16 draw. Since the authors have not been familiar with the related sports analytics literature,…
Competitive balance is an important concept for professional sports and one of the key issues that European football has to address in order to ensure its long-term prosperity. However, the quantification of competitive balance is not an…
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 this paper we show a new technique to analyze families of rankings. In particular we focus on sports rankings and, more precisely, on soccer leagues. We consider that two teams compete when they change their relative positions in…
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…
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is…
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…
A question is raised on whether some implied regularity or structure, as found in soccer team ranking by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), is due to implicit game result value or score competition conditions. The analysis…
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…
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…
A random walk-like model is considered to discuss statistical aspects of tournaments. The model is applied to soccer leagues with emphasis on the scores. This competitive system was computationally simulated and the results are compared…
Qualifications for several world championships in sports are organised such that distinct sets of teams play in their own tournament for a predetermined number of slots. Inspired by a recent work studying the problem with the tools from the…