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Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues
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, stron...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8672071/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34925866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210617 |
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author | Maimone, Victor Martins Yasseri, Taha |
author_facet | Maimone, Victor Martins Yasseri, Taha |
author_sort | Maimone, Victor Martins |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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 football’s predictability or therefore, lack of excitement; however, we propose several hypotheses which could be tested in future analyses. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8672071 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-86720712021-12-16 Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues Maimone, Victor Martins Yasseri, Taha R Soc Open Sci Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence 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 football’s predictability or therefore, lack of excitement; however, we propose several hypotheses which could be tested in future analyses. The Royal Society 2021-12-15 /pmc/articles/PMC8672071/ /pubmed/34925866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210617 Text en © 2021 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Maimone, Victor Martins Yasseri, Taha Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title | Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title_full | Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title_fullStr | Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title_full_unstemmed | Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title_short | Football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
title_sort | football is becoming more predictable; network analysis of 88 thousand matches in 11 major leagues |
topic | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8672071/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34925866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210617 |
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