Estimation of final standings in football competitions with a premature ending: the case of COVID-19
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Paolo Gorgi; Rutger Lit; Siem Jan Koopman
- Source
- Advances in Statistical Analysis
AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis. Springer Verlag
- Subject
- Statistics and Probability
Estimation
Original Paper
Economics and Econometrics
Schedule
2019-20 coronavirus outbreak
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Computer science
Applied Mathematics
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
COVID-19
Football
Sport statistics
SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
Ranking
League table
Modeling and Simulation
Bivariate Poisson
Paired-comparison models
Econometrics
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Analysis
- Language
- ISSN
- 1863-818X
1863-8171
We study an alternative approach to determine the final league table in football competitions with a premature ending. For several countries, a premature ending of the 2019/2020 football season has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose a model-based method as a possible alternative to the use of the incomplete standings to determine the final table. This method measures the performance of the teams in the matches of the season that have been played and predicts the remaining non-played matches through a paired-comparison model. The main advantage of the method compared to the incomplete standings is that it takes account of the bias in the performance measure due to the schedule of the matches in a season. Therefore, the resulting ranking of the teams based on our proposed method can be regarded as more fair in this respect. A forecasting study based on historical data of seven of the main European competitions is used to validate the method. The empirical results suggest that the model-based approach produces more accurate predictions of the true final standings than those based on the incomplete standings.