Dynamic modelling and prediction of English Football League matches for betting

Abstract

Summary. We focus on modelling the 92 soccer teams in the English Football Association League over the years 1992–1997 using refinements of the independent Poisson model of Dixon and Coles. Our framework assumes that each team has attack and defence strengths that evolve through time (rather than remaining constant) according to some unobserved bivariate stochastic process. Estimation of the teams' attack and defence capabilities is undertaken via a novel approach involving an approximation that is computationally convenient and fast. The results of this approximation compare very favourably with results obtained through the Dixon and Coles approach. We note that the full model (i.e. the model before the above approximation is made) may be implemented using Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures, and that this approach is vastly more computationally expensive. We focus on the probabilities of home win, draw or away win because these outcomes constitute the primary betting market. These probabilities are estimated for games played between any two of the 92 teams and the predictions are compared with the actual results.