On the importance of the probabilistic model in identifying the most decisive games in a tournament

Corona, F, De Dios Tena Horrillo, J ORCID: 0000-0001-8281-2886 and Wiper, MP (2017) On the importance of the probabilistic model in identifying the most decisive games in a tournament Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 13 (1). pp. 11-23. ISSN 2194-6388, 1559-0410

Text s1-ln2165760695844769-1939656818Hwf1015392892IdV2721493021657606PDF_HI0001.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript Download (779kB)

Abstract

Identifying the decisive matches in international football tournaments is of great relevance for a variety of decision makers such as organizers, team coaches and/or media managers. This paper addresses this issue by analyzing the role of the statistical approach used to estimate the outcome of the game on the identification of decisive matches on international tournaments for national football teams. We extend the measure of decisiveness proposed by Geenens (2014) in order to allow us to predict or evaluate the decisive matches before, during and after a particular game on the tournament. Using information from the 2014 FIFA World Cup, our results suggest that Poisson and kernel regressions significantly outperform the forecasts of ordered probit models. Moreover, we find that although the identification of the most decisive matches is independent of the model considered, the identification of other key matches is model dependent. We also apply this methodology to identify the favorite teams and to predict the most decisive matches in 2015 Copa America before the start of the competition. Furthermore, we compare our forecast approach with respect to the original measure during the knockout stage.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	49 Mathematical Sciences, 4905 Statistics, 42 Health Sciences, 4207 Sports Science and Exercise
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2017 12:44
Last Modified:	23 May 2026 00:41
DOI:	10.1515/jqas-2016-0013
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3006295
Disclaimer:	The University of Liverpool is not responsible for content contained on other websites from links within repository metadata. Please contact us if you notice anything that appears incorrect or inappropriate.