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Modelling football outcomes has gained increasing attention, in large part due to the potential for making substantial profits. Despite the strong connection existing between football models and the bookmakers' betting odds, no authors have…
This work reconciles two perspectives on the Elo ranking that coexist in the literature: the practitioner's view as a heuristic feedback rule, and the statistician's view as online maximum likelihood estimation via stochastic gradient…
The expected goal provides a more representative measure of the team and player performance which also suit the low-scoring nature of football instead of score in modern football. The score of a match involves randomness and often may not…
In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work…
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…
In this work we study the ranking algorithm used by F\'ed\'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA); we analyze the parameters it currently uses, show the formal probabilistic model from which it can be derived, and optimize…
Three state-of-the-art statistical ranking methods for forecasting football matches are combined with several other predictors in a hybrid machine learning model. Namely an ability estimate for every team based on historic matches; an…
Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate reinforcements,…
This paper aims to reduce randomness in football by analysing the role of lineups in final scores using machine learning prediction models we have developed. Football clubs invest millions of dollars on lineups and knowing how individual…
In this paper, the new two stage and postseason system of J1 League, the top division of professional football in Japan, is simulated. Official regulation defines that the new postseason from the 2015 season consists of five teams selected…
The success of a football team depends on various individual skills and performances of the selected players as well as how cohesively they perform. We propose a two-stage process for selecting optimal playing eleven of a football team from…
In international football (soccer), two-legged knockout ties, with each team playing at home in one leg and the final outcome decided on aggregate, are common. Many players, managers and followers seem to believe in the `second-leg home…
The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the…
Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the…
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…
A myriad of different data are generated to characterize a soccer match. Here we discuss which performance indicators are particularly helpful to forecast the future results of a team via an estimation of the underlying team strengths with…
The organisers of major sports competitions use different policies with respect to constraints in the group draw. Our paper aims to rationalise these choices by analysing the trade-off between attractiveness (the number of games played by…
In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes…
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…
Volleyball is a team sport with unique and specific characteristics. We introduce a new two level-hierarchical Bayesian model which accounts for theses volleyball specific characteristics. In the first level, we model the set outcome with a…