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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…
We propose a novel algorithm that outputs the final standings of a soccer league, based on a simple dynamics that mimics a soccer tournament. In our model, a team is created with a defined potential(ability) which is updated during the…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
Evaluating a soccer player's performance can be challenging due to the high costs and small margins involved in recruitment decisions. Raw observational statistics further complicate an accurate individual skill assessment as they do not…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
Fantasy Premier League engages the football community in selecting the Premier League players who will perform best from gameweek to gameweek. Access to accurate performance forecasts gives participants an edge over competitors by guiding…
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…
Fantasy football is a billion-dollar industry with millions of participants. Under a fixed budget, managers select squads to maximize future Fantasy Premier League (FPL) points. This study formulates lineup selection as data-driven…
In professional sports, a team has clinched the playoffs if they are guaranteed a postseason spot, regardless of the outcomes of any remaining games. As the season progresses, sports fans and other stakeholders are interested in precisely…
We present a systematic approach to the prediction of soccer matches. First, we show that the information about chances for goals is by far more informative than about the actual results. Second, we present a multivariate regression…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
Analyzing defenses in team sports is generally challenging because of the limited event data. Researchers have previously proposed methods to evaluate football team defense by predicting the events of ball gain and being attacked using…
We investigated the temporal distribution of goals in soccer using event-level data from 3,433 matches across 21 leagues and competitions. Contrary to the prevailing notion of randomness, we found that the probability of a goal being scored…
This paper investigates the fairness of the 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifying competition via Monte Carlo simulations. The qualifying probabilities are calculated for 102 nations, all teams except for African and European countries. A method…
Cooperative game theory has diverse applications in contemporary artificial intelligence, including domains like interpretable machine learning, resource allocation, and collaborative decision-making. However, specifying a cooperative game…
This paper develops a general framework for stochastic modeling of goals and other events in football (soccer) matches. The events are modelled as Cox processes (doubly stochastic Poisson processes) where the event intensities may depend on…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…
We propose an approach for the analysis and prediction of a football championship. It is based on Poisson regression models that include the Elo points of the teams as covariates and incorporates differences of team-specific effects. These…