Related papers: Leicester's Tale: Another Perspective on the EPL 2…
We consider the task of determining a football player's ability for a given event type, for example, scoring a goal. We propose an interpretable Bayesian model which is fit using variational inference methods. We implement a Poisson model…
During the last few sports seasons a lot of discussion has been generated for the several, high-profile, "comebacks" that were observed in almost all sports. The Cavaliers won the championship after being down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA finals'…
Converting betting odds into accurate outcome probabilities is a fundamental challenge in order to use betting odds as a benchmark for sports forecasting and market efficiency analysis. In this study, we propose two methods to overcome the…
Fantasy Premier League (FPL) performance predictors tend to base their algorithms purely on historical statistical data. The main problems with this approach is that external factors such as injuries, managerial decisions and other…
Transfers play a pivotal role in shaping a football club's success, yet forecasting whether a transfer will succeed remains difficult due to the strong context-dependence of on-field performance. Existing evaluation practices often rely on…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
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…
We present an extensive statistical analysis of the results of all sports competitions in five major sports leagues in England and the United States. We characterize the parity among teams by the variance in the winning fraction from…
Results in contact sports like Rugby are mainly interpreted in terms of the ability and/or luck of teams. But this neglects the important role of the {\em motivation} of players, reflected in the effort exerted in the game. Here we present…
Analysis of the popular expected goals (xG) metric in soccer has determined that a (slightly) smaller number of high-quality attempts will likely yield more goals than a slew of low-quality ones. This observation has driven a change in…
Complex interactions between two opposing agents frequently occur in domains of machine learning, game theory, and other application domains. Quantitatively analyzing the strategies involved can provide an objective basis for…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
With the development of measurement technology, data on the movements of actual games in various sports can be obtained and used for planning and evaluating the tactics and strategy. Defense in team sports is generally difficult to be…
This paper presents a groundbreaking model for forecasting English Premier League (EPL) player performance using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We evaluate Ridge regression, LightGBM and CNNs on the task of predicting upcoming player…
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…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…
Prediction and modelling of competitive sports outcomes has received much recent attention, especially from the Bayesian statistics and machine learning communities. In the real world setting of outcome prediction, the seminal \'{E}l\H{o}…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. The…
This paper introduces an innovative application of Large Event Models (LEMs), akin to Large Language Models, to the domain of soccer analytics. By learning the language of soccer - predicting variables for subsequent events rather than…