We provide an overview and comparison of predictive capabilities of several methods for ranking association football teams. The main benchmark used is the official FIFA ranking for national teams. The ranking points of teams are turned into predictions that are next evaluated based on their accuracy. This enables us to determine which ranking method is more accurate. The best performing algorithm is a version of the famous Elo rating system that originates from chess player ratings, but several other methods (and method versions) provide better predictive performance than the official ranking method. Being able to predict match outcomes better than the official method might have implications for, e.g., a team's strategy to schedule friendly games.
Coordinated movements of players are key to success in team sports. However, traditional models for player movements are based on unrealistic assumptions and their analysis is prone to errors. As a remedy, we propose to estimate individual movement models from positional data and show how to turn these estimates into accurate and realistic zones of control. Our approach accounts for characteristic traits of players, scales with large amounts of data, and can be efficiently computed in a distributed fashion. We report on empirical results.
The efficacy of different league formats in ranking teams according to their true latent strength is analysed. To this end, a new approach for estimating attacking and defensive strengths based on the Poisson regression for modelling match outcomes is proposed. Various performance metrics are estimated reflecting the agreement between latent teams’ strength parameters and their final rank in the league table. The tournament designs studied here are used in the majority of European top-tier association football competitions. Based on numerical experiments, it turns out that a two-stage league format comprising of the three round-robin tournament together with an extra single round-robin is the most efficacious setting. In particular, it is the most accurate in selecting the best team as the winner of the league. Its efficacy can be enhanced by setting the number of points allocated for a win to two (instead of three that is currently in effect in association football).
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