https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210617
Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues
Victor Martins Maimone and Taha Yasseri
Abstract
In recent years, excessive monetization of football and professionalism
among the players have been argued to have affected the quality of the
match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and the players are highly motivated; on the
other hand, stronger teams have higher incomes and therefore afford
better players leading to an even stronger appearance in tournaments
that can make the game more imbalanced and hence predictable. To
quantify and document this observation, in this work, we take a
minimalist network science approach to measure the predictability of
football over 26 years in major European leagues. We show that over
time, the games in major leagues have indeed become more predictable. We provide further support for this observation by showing that inequality
between teams has increased and the home-field advantage has been
vanishing ubiquitously. We do not include any direct analysis on the
effects of monetization on footballrCOs predictability or therefore, lack
of excitement; however, we propose several hypotheses which could be
tested in future analyses.
-- HASM
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