Abstract
In any sport competition, there is a strong interest in knowing which team shall be the champion at the end of the championship. Besides this, the end result of a match, the chance of a team to be qualified for a specific tournament, the chance of being relegated, the best attack, the best defense, among others, are also subject of interest. In this paper we present a simple method with good predictive quality, easy implementation, low computational effort, which allows the calculation of all the interesting quantities above. Following Lee (1997), we estimate the average goals scored by each team by assuming that the number of goals scored by a team in a match follows a univariate Poisson distribution but we consider linear models that express the sum and the difference of goals scored in terms of five covariates: the goal average in a match, the home-team advantage, the team’s offensive power, the opponent team’s defensive power and a crisis indicator. The methodology is applied to the 2008-2009 English Premier League.
Highlights
Football is one of the most popular sports in the world
In this paper, following Lee (1997), we estimate the average goals scored by each team by assuming that the number of goals scored by a team in a match follows a univariate Poisson distribution but we consider linear models that express the sum and the difference of goals scored in terms of five covariates: the goal average in a match, the home team advantage, the team’s offensive power, the opponent team’s defensive power and a crisis indicator
In linear model (3), (X + Y )i is the total of goals scored in the i-th match; the vector α is composed by N + 2 parameters (N parameters associated with each one of the teams listed in the dataset; one parameter associated with the home advantage and one parameter associated if one of the teams is in crisis)
Summary
Football is one of the most popular sports in the world. Played in several countries, it is a collective sport played by two teams whose purpose is to put the ball into the opposing team’s goal (score a goal). The objective of this paper is to present a simple method with good predictive quality, easy implementation, low computational effort that allows the calculation of the interest probabilities: which team will be the champion, which ones will be relegated, which ones will qualify to another tournament, which team will be the best home team, which team will be the best away team (the team that scores the most points playing outside their hometown) etc. We generate the score of the matches to be provide in order to estimate the simple matches predictions and simulate several whole tournament to obtain the probability to be champion, to be relegated, to reach among the three best ranked teams etc.
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