Statistical Analysis Shows The Outcome Is More Predictable Than Expected.

 

Over in Europe, the most popular sport is football or soccer as it is known in the United States.  I was in Germany one year during the time of the World Cup and restaurants had those huge televisions placed around outside so people would watch the matches.  Young men and women played with balls in the empty spaces between diners and in any empty space they could find.  People showed their support for their favorite team by flying their flags off their balconies.  So it is as big in Europe as it football is in the United State.

Two researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed over 88,000 matches from the European League professional football matches to discover something quite amazing.  Many watchers have commented that matches now are not as exciting as they have been in the past because the outcomes have become more predictable. Some suggested this is due to the teams with more money being able to attract the best players by paying them more.  In addition, it is suggested that those who are not as good have seen their skill levels have stagnated or fallen.  It is speculated that these two possibilities have lead to people being able to predict the outcome before the game even starts.

The two researchers at the University of Oxford decided to find out if this was true. They analyzed over 88,000 games played by 11 major European Leagues between 1993 and 2019.  They looked at matches played between the teams from Scotland, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Turkey, and the best teams in England. Specifically they looked at the results of the matches as compared with the predictions. 

They first built a model that would use various factors to predict the winner of the match which they used to to predict the winners of the actual matches before comparing the results with the actual results. The model was written to predict whether the home or away team should win based on the results of a certain number of previous matches.  In addition, the model used was less sophisticated than the programs used by modern betting houses but it allows the researcher the ability to go back 20 or 30 years easily.  Even though it was simpler, it still ended up being about 75 percent accurate.

As they analyzed the results, they noticed that as the years passed, the predicted results matched the actual results more accurately. For instance, when the model looked at the results of a German league back in 1993, it managed to predict the correct winner for 60 percent of the matches but by 2019, it was 80 percent accurate. Furthermore, they discovered the points were distributed less evenly as time passed and it appears the stronger teams have grown stronger while the weaker teams get weaker.

This could be due to an inequality of resources meaning the stronger teams tended to win their matches more often possibly due to making more money due to popularity which means they are able to attract the better players creating a stronger team.  One surprising result was that the home team advantage made very little difference as the years passed.  In the early 1990's the home team had about a 30 percent better chance of winning but by late 2019 it had struck to about 15 percent. 

Who would ever have thought of analyzing soccer games to see if the predicted winner actually won?  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.