Assessing competitive balance in the English Premier League for over forty seasons using a stochastic block model-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Assessing competitive balance in the English Premier League for over forty seasons using a stochastic block model

Published:2023-02-14 Issue:3 Volume:186 Page:530-556
ISSN:0964-1998
Container-title:Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society
language:en
Short-container-title:

Author:

Basini Francesca¹,Tsouli Vasiliki²,Ntzoufras Ioannis²^ORCID,Friel Nial³⁴

Affiliation:

1. Department of Mathematics, University of Warwick , Coventry , UK

2. Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business , Athens , Greece

3. School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin , Dublin , Ireland

4. Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Dublin , Dublin , Ireland

Abstract

Abstract Competitive balance is of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. We develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams in a league. We represent the outcome of all matches in a football season as a dense network with nodes identified by teams and categorical edges representing the outcome of each game as a win, draw, or a loss. The main focus and motivation for this paper is to assess the issue of competitive balance in the context of the English First Division / Premier League over more than 40 seasons. Our analysis provides evidence suggesting a structural change around the early 2000s from a reasonably balanced league to a two-tier league.

Funder

Science Foundation Ireland

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Subject

Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty,Economics and Econometrics,Social Sciences (miscellaneous),Statistics and Probability

Link

https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article-pdf/186/3/530/50686374/qnad007.pdf

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