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Contents Copyright.Last revised: 23/11/2011
Ioannis Ntzoufras
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IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, 20, 133-146.
SYNOPSIS
Modeling football match outcomes is becoming increasingly popular nowadays for both team managers and betting funs. Most of the existing literature deals with modeling the number of goals scored by each team. In the present paper we work in a different direction. Instead of modeling the number of goals directly, we focus on the difference of the number of goals, i.e. the margin of victory. Modelling the differences instead of the scores themselves has some major advantages. Firstly, we eliminate correlation imposed by the fact that the two opponent teams compete each other and secondly we do not assume that the scored goals by each team are marginally Poisson distributed. Application of the Bayesian methodology for the Skellam's distribution using covariates is discussed. Illustrations using real data from the English Premiership for the season 2006-2007 are provided. The advantages of the proposed approach are also discussed.
Keywords: Goal difference, Overdispersion, Poisson difference, Skellam's Distribution, Soccer, Zero Inflated Models.
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