IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/jqsprt/v6y2010i4n4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Who Deserved the 2008-2009 Belgian Football Champion Title? A Semiparametric Answer

Author

Listed:
  • Geenens Gery

    (University of Melbourne)

Abstract

Football (soccer) is certainly the most popular sport in Belgium. In 2008-2009, the Belgian premier league (the so-called Jupiler Pro League) consisted of 18 teams, each having played others twice, home and away. Wins and draws earned 3 points and 1 point, respectively, and teams were first ranked by total points and then by total wins, regardless of the goal difference (or the number of goals scored), unlike in most European leagues. Obviously, the Belgian Champion should have been the team which had ended the season on top of the ranking, but a very unlikely event happened: the first two teams, Sporting Anderlecht and Standard Liege, completed the season with exactly the same number of points (77) and the same number of victories (24). Although the goal difference was in favor of Anderlecht, an extraordinary playoff match was hastily organized to decide the championship, and Standard ended up winning. That dramatic denouement sustained the discussions among the large football-lover part of the Belgian population and opens the interrogation: which team was really the best? The aim of this work is to objectively investigate this question through statistical modelling. Given the results of the whole season, a semiparametric model for the conditional probabilities of home win, tie and away win for each match, given the involved teams and other explanatory variables, is fit. The semiparametric nature of the model grants a great flexibility and allows us to identify interesting and up to now ignored patterns in the above probabilities. Then, a large number of Monte-Carlo simulations are run as if the season was replayed a large number of times, which permits the estimation of absolute probabilities of many events of possible interest. In particular, clear evidence about which team really deserved the 2008-2009 Belgian football champion title appears.

Suggested Citation

  • Geenens Gery, 2010. "Who Deserved the 2008-2009 Belgian Football Champion Title? A Semiparametric Answer," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 6(4), pages 1-31, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:6:y:2010:i:4:n:4
    DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1225
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2202/1559-0410.1225
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2202/1559-0410.1225?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Koning, Ruud H. & Koolhaas, Michael & Renes, Gusta & Ridder, Geert, 2003. "A simulation model for football championships," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 148(2), pages 268-276, July.
    2. Brillinger David R, 2007. "A Potential Function Approach to the Flow of Play in Soccer," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 3(1), pages 1-21, January.
    3. M. J. Maher, 1982. "Modelling association football scores," Statistica Neerlandica, Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research, vol. 36(3), pages 109-118, September.
    4. Geenens, Gery & Simar, Léopold, 2010. "Nonparametric tests for conditional independence in two-way contingency tables," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 101(4), pages 765-788, April.
    5. Klein, Roger W & Spady, Richard H, 1993. "An Efficient Semiparametric Estimator for Binary Response Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(2), pages 387-421, March.
    6. D Dyte & S R Clarke, 2000. "A ratings based Poisson model for World Cup soccer simulation," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 51(8), pages 993-998, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Geenens, Gery, 2014. "On the decisiveness of a game in a tournament," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 232(1), pages 156-168.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Corona Francisco & Horrillo Juan de Dios Tena & Wiper Michael Peter, 2017. "On the importance of the probabilistic model in identifying the most decisive games in a tournament," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 11-23, March.
    2. László Csató, 2020. "Optimal Tournament Design: Lessons From the Men’s Handball Champions League," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(8), pages 848-868, December.
    3. M Wright & N Hirotsu, 2003. "The professional foul in football: Tactics and deterrents," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 54(3), pages 213-221, March.
    4. Dagaev Dmitry & Rudyak Vladimir Yu., 2019. "Seeding the UEFA Champions League participants: evaluation of the reforms," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 15(2), pages 129-140, June.
    5. Chater, Mario & Arrondel, Luc & Gayant, Jean-Pascal & Laslier, Jean-François, 2021. "Fixing match-fixing: Optimal schedules to promote competitiveness," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 294(2), pages 673-683.
    6. Sebastián Cea & Guillermo Durán & Mario Guajardo & Denis Sauré & Joaquín Siebert & Gonzalo Zamorano, 2020. "An analytics approach to the FIFA ranking procedure and the World Cup final draw," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 286(1), pages 119-146, March.
    7. Leitner, Christoph & Zeileis, Achim & Hornik, Kurt, 2010. "Forecasting sports tournaments by ratings of (prob)abilities: A comparison for the EUROÂ 2008," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 471-481, July.
    8. Scarf, Phil & Parma, Rishikesh & McHale, Ian, 2019. "On outcome uncertainty and scoring rates in sport: The case of international rugby union," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 273(2), pages 721-730.
    9. Hirotsu Nobuyoshi & Ito Masamitsu & Miyaji Chikara & Hamano Koji & Taguchi Azuma, 2009. "Modeling Tactical Changes of Formation in Association Football as a Non-Zero-Sum Game," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 5(3), pages 1-15, July.
    10. Corona, Francisco & Forrest, David & Tena, J.D. & Wiper, Michael, 2019. "Bayesian forecasting of UEFA Champions League under alternative seeding regimes," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 722-732.
    11. Geenens, Gery, 2014. "On the decisiveness of a game in a tournament," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 232(1), pages 156-168.
    12. Hirotsu Nobuyoshi & Wright Mike B, 2006. "Modeling Tactical Changes of Formation in Association Football as a Zero-Sum Game," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 2(2), pages 1-22, April.
    13. O'Leary, Daniel E., 2017. "Crowd performance in prediction of the World Cup 2014," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 260(2), pages 715-724.
    14. Fry, John & Serbera, Jean-Philippe & Wilson, Rob, 2021. "Managing performance expectations in association football," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 445-453.
    15. Goddard, John, 2005. "Regression models for forecasting goals and match results in association football," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 331-340.
    16. A D Fitt & C J Howls & M Kabelka, 2006. "Valuation of soccer spread bets," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 57(8), pages 975-985, August.
    17. Corona, Francisco & Forrest, David, 2017. "Evaluating significant effects from alternative seeding systems : a Bayesian approach, with an application to the UEFA Champions League," DES - Working Papers. Statistics and Econometrics. WS 24521, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Estadística.
    18. Cunniffe Nik J & Cook Alex R, 2009. "Cruel and Unusual Punishment? An Analysis of Point Deduction in European Association Football Leagues," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 5(4), pages 1-20, October.
    19. Ai, Chunrong & Chen, Xiaohong, 2007. "Estimation of possibly misspecified semiparametric conditional moment restriction models with different conditioning variables," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(1), pages 5-43, November.
    20. Ichimura, Hidehiko & Todd, Petra E., 2007. "Implementing Nonparametric and Semiparametric Estimators," Handbook of Econometrics, in: J.J. Heckman & E.E. Leamer (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 6, chapter 74, Elsevier.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:6:y:2010:i:4:n:4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.