Related papers: Predicting Qualification Thresholds in UEFA's inco…
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Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
In a round-robin tournament, a team may lack the incentive to win if its final rank does not depend on the outcome of the matches still to be played. This paper introduces a classification scheme to determine these weakly (where one team is…
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…
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 report is devoted to the forecast of the UEFA EURO 2020, Europe's continental football championship, taking place across Europe in June/July 2021. We present the simulation results for this tournament, where the simulations are based…
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…
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…
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…
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…