IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tin/wpaper/20200070.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Estimation of final standings in football competitions with premature ending: the case of COVID-19

Author

Listed:
  • Paolo Gorgi

    (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

  • Siem Jan Koopman

    (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

  • Rutger Lit

    (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Abstract

We study an alternative approach to determine the final league table in football competitions with a premature ending. For several countries, a premature ending of the 2019/2020 football season has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose a model-based method as a possible alternative to the use of the incomplete standings to determine the final table. This method measures the performance of the teams in the matches of the season that have been played and predicts the remaining non-played matches through a paired-comparison model. The main advantage of the method compared to the incomplete standings is that it takes account of the bias in the performance measure due to the schedule of the matches in a season. Therefore, the resulting ranking of the teams based on our proposed method can be regarded as more fair in this respect. A forecasting study based on historical data of seven of the main European competitions is used to validate the method. The empirical results suggest that the model-based approach produces more accurate predictions of the true final standings than those based on the incomplete standings.

Suggested Citation

  • Paolo Gorgi & Siem Jan Koopman & Rutger Lit, 2020. "Estimation of final standings in football competitions with premature ending: the case of COVID-19," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 20-070/III, Tinbergen Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20200070
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/20070.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Koopman, Siem Jan & Lit, Rutger, 2019. "Forecasting football match results in national league competitions using score-driven time series models," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 797-809.
    2. Siem Jan Koopman & Rutger Lit, 2015. "A dynamic bivariate Poisson model for analysing and forecasting match results in the English Premier League," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 178(1), pages 167-186, January.
    3. Hvattum, Lars Magnus & Arntzen, Halvard, 2010. "Using ELO ratings for match result prediction in association football," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 460-470, July.
    4. Pascual, Lorenzo & Romo, Juan & Ruiz, Esther, 2006. "Bootstrap prediction for returns and volatilities in GARCH models," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 50(9), pages 2293-2312, May.
    5. Blasques, Francisco & Koopman, Siem Jan & Łasak, Katarzyna & Lucas, André, 2016. "In-sample confidence bands and out-of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters in observation-driven models," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 875-887.
    6. M. J. Maher, 1982. "Modelling association football scores," Statistica Neerlandica, Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research, vol. 36(3), pages 109-118, September.
    7. Babatunde Buraimo & Rob Simmons & Marek Maciaszczyk, 2012. "Favoritism And Referee Bias In European Soccer: Evidence From The Spanish League And The Uefa Champions League," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 30(3), pages 329-343, July.
    8. 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.
    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. J. James Reade, 2023. "Large Sporting Events and Public Health and Safety," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2023-04, Department of Economics, University of Reading.

    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. da Costa, Igor Barbosa & Marinho, Leandro Balby & Pires, Carlos Eduardo Santos, 2022. "Forecasting football results and exploiting betting markets: The case of “both teams to score”," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 895-909.
    2. Lasek, Jan & Gagolewski, Marek, 2021. "Interpretable sports team rating models based on the gradient descent algorithm," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 1061-1071.
    3. Raffaele Mattera, 2023. "Forecasting binary outcomes in soccer," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 115-134, June.
    4. Robert C. Smit & Francesco Ravazzolo & Luca Rossini, 2020. "Dynamic Bayesian forecasting of English Premier League match results with the Skellam distribution," BEMPS - Bozen Economics & Management Paper Series BEMPS72, Faculty of Economics and Management at the Free University of Bozen.
    5. Marc Garnica-Caparrós & Daniel Memmert & Fabian Wunderlich, 2022. "Artificial data in sports forecasting: a simulation framework for analysing predictive models in sports," Information Systems and e-Business Management, Springer, vol. 20(3), pages 551-580, September.
    6. Baboota, Rahul & Kaur, Harleen, 2019. "Predictive analysis and modelling football results using machine learning approach for English Premier League," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 741-755.
    7. Wheatcroft, Edward, 2020. "A profitable model for predicting the over/under market in football," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 916-932.
    8. Jiří LahviÄ ka, 2015. "The Impact of Playoffs on Seasonal Uncertainty in the Czech Ice Hockey Extraliga," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 16(7), pages 784-801, October.
    9. Holmes, Benjamin & McHale, Ian G., 2024. "Forecasting football match results using a player rating based model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 302-312.
    10. Andreas Heuer & Oliver Rubner, 2014. "Optimizing the Prediction Process: From Statistical Concepts to the Case Study of Soccer," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(9), pages 1-9, September.
    11. Koopman, Siem Jan & Lit, Rutger, 2019. "Forecasting football match results in national league competitions using score-driven time series models," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 797-809.
    12. Giovanni Angelini & Luca De Angelis, 2017. "PARX model for football match predictions," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(7), pages 795-807, November.
    13. J. James Reade & Carl Singleton & Alasdair Brown, 2021. "Evaluating strange forecasts: The curious case of football match scorelines," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 68(2), pages 261-285, May.
    14. Rebeggiani, Luca & Gross, Johannes, 2018. "Chance or Ability? The Efficiency of the Football Betting Market Revisited," VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy 181563, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    15. Wunderlich, Fabian & Memmert, Daniel, 2020. "Are betting returns a useful measure of accuracy in (sports) forecasting?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 713-722.
    16. Wheatcroft, Edward, 2020. "A profitable model for predicting the over/under market in football," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103712, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    17. Szczecinski Leszek, 2022. "G-Elo: generalization of the Elo algorithm by modeling the discretized margin of victory," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 18(1), pages 1-14, March.
    18. Schwarz Wolf, 2012. "Predicting the Maximum Lead from Final Scores in Basketball: A Diffusion Model," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 8(4), pages 1-15, November.
    19. Csató, László, 2023. "How to avoid uncompetitive games? The importance of tie-breaking rules," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 307(3), pages 1260-1269.
    20. Stekler, H.O. & Sendor, David & Verlander, Richard, 2010. "Issues in sports forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 606-621, July.
      • Herman O. Stekler & David Sendor & Richard Verlander, 2009. "Issues in Sports Forecasting," Working Papers 2009-002, The George Washington University, Department of Economics, H. O. Stekler Research Program on Forecasting.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bivariate Poisson; COVID-19; paired-comparison models; sport statistics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C32 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:tin:wpaper:20200070. 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: Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tinbenl.html .

    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.