Related papers: Regularities in football goal distributions
Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. It turns out…
A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…
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…
Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals for…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
We analyze the time series of soccer matches in a model-free way using data for the German soccer league (Bundesliga). We argue that the goal difference is a better measure for the overall fitness of a team than the number of points. It is…
The non-scientific event of a soccer match is analysed on a strictly scientific level. The analysis is based on the recently introduced concept of a team fitness (Eur. Phys. J. B 67, 445, 2009) and requires the use of finite-size scaling. A…
The English Premier League is well-known for being not only one of the most popular professional sports leagues in the world, but also one of the toughest competitions to predict. The first purpose of this research was to verify the…
We investigate the dynamics of football matches. Our goal is to characterize statistically the temporal sequence of ball movements in this collective sport game, searching for traits of complex behavior. Data were collected over a variety…
A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…
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…
An exponentially decaying system looks as if its decay was a generalized power or double-exponential law, provided one takes into account the relativistic time dilation in a detector, the delay of the emitted signal, and the accelerations…
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 paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf--Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of…
In this article, we study the dynamics of marking in football matches. To do this, we surveyed and analyzed a database containing the trajectories of players from both teams on the field of play during three professional games. We describe…
In this study, the stochastic properties of player and team ball possession times in professional football matches are examined. Data analysis shows that player possession time follows a gamma distribution and the player count of a team…
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…
We propose a simple stochastic model describing the position-dependent ball-passing network in football games. In this network, a player on a certain area in the divided fields is a node, and a pass between two nodes corresponds to an edge.…
We analyse the distributions of the number of goals scored by home teams, away teams, and the total scored in the match, in domestic football games from 169 countries between 1999 and 2001. The probability density functions (PDFs) of goals…
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…