How to improve a team's position in the FIFA ranking? A simulation study

Abstract

In this paper, we study the efficacy of the official ranking for international football teams compiled by FIFA, the body governing football competition around the globe. We present strategies for improving a team's position in the ranking. By combining several statistical techniques, we derive an objective function in a decision problem of optimal scheduling of future matches. The presented results display how a team's position can be improved. Along the way, we compare the official procedure to the famous Elo rating system. Although it originates from chess, it has been successfully tailored to ranking football teams as well.

When neither team wants to win: A flaw of recent UEFA qualification rules

“…For example, both FIFA and UEFA are advised to follow one of the two mechanisms suggested in Csató (2018a). Hopefully, the decision of the FIFA Council on the use of a new formula for the FIFA / Coca-Cola World Ranking on 10 June 2018 (FIFA, 2018) indicates that administrators are increasingly open to criticism from the scientific community (Lasek et al, 2013(Lasek et al, , 2016.…”

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“…The study on the performance of football teams, the creation of different profiles and the level of play could provide useful means and facilitate the work of coaches and analysts in assessing the performance of teams and/or players, so the choice to rely on the ranking could result innovative. The ranking depends not only on the good performance of the team, that is on the scores obtained, but also on the choice of the right opponent, who does not favor the clash between two high ranking teams (Lasek, et al, 2016). Moreover, as described in a previous study whose purpose was to develop a new method of calculating points, an advantage emerges in the calculation of the final score from the field factor, that is considering the games played at home.…”

The efficacy of league formats in ranking teams

“…In the multi-armed bandit problem (Katehakis and Veinott, 1987), the goal is to maximize total payoffs from slot machines with unknown rewards distributions. In sports (including e-sports), the issue of designing an efficacious tournament in selecting the best participants among competing individuals or teams occurs naturally (Langville and Meyer, 2012; Lasek et al, 2016; Stefani, 1997). Thus, the efficacy of competition formats is among the most important criteria taken into account in tournament design.…”