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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…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
In this work, we extended a stochastic model for football leagues based on the team's potential [R. da Silva et al. Comput. Phys. Commun. \textbf{184} 661--670 (2013)] for making predictions instead of only performing a successful…
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…
I present a double-elimination format for the 48-team FIFA World Cup that solves many of the concerns raised about the considered formats with mixed round-robin with groups of 3 or 4 teams and single-elimination strategies. Using a…
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…
This article is devoted to the forecast of the FIFA World Cup 2022 via nested zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression. Our regression model incorporates the Elo points of the participating teams, the location of the matches and the of…
Forecast of football outcomes in terms of Home Win, Draw and Away Win relies largely on ex ante probability elicitation of these events and ex post verification of them via computation of probability scoring rules (Brier, Ranked…
The NBA draft can incentivize teams to deliberately lose. We propose a draft mechanism that is practical, incentive-compatible, and favors weaker teams. The Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) framework represents a paradigm shift in…
Playing in the FIFA World Cup finals is an ambition shared by several nations. Since, besides luck and skill, the probability of qualification depends on the design of the qualifiers, the study of these competitions forms an integral part…
Composing a team of professional players is among the most crucial decisions in association football. Nevertheless, transfer market decisions are often based on myopic objectives and are questionable from a financial point of view. This…
Penalty shootouts play a crucial role in the knockout stage of major football tournaments. Their importance has substantially increased from the 2021/22 season, when the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) scrapped the away goals…
The draw for the 2022 FIFA World Cup has been organised before the identity of three winners of the play-offs is revealed. Seeding has been based on the FIFA World Ranking released on 31 March 2022 but these three teams have been drawn from…
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…
This work is concerned with the rating of players/teams in face-to-face games with three possible outcomes: loss, win, and draw. This is one of the fundamental problems in sport analytics, where the very simple and popular, non-trivial…
There is enduring interest in disentangling the effects of skill and luck in sport. A key issue in Formula 1 is distinguishing between car-level and driver-level effects. Four elite teams currently dominate Formula 1 and have won every…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
Probabilistic modeling is an effective tool for evaluating team performance and predicting outcomes in sports. However, an important question that hasn't been fully explored is whether these models can reliably reflect actual performance…
In this paper a new heuristic optimization algorithm has been introduced based on the performance of the major football leagues within each season in EU countries. The algorithm starts with an initial population including three different…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…