Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Csató, László
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Csató, László
author_facet Csató, László
contents One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches. To guarantee that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength in the new design, it is crucial to forecast the performance of the teams before the tournament as well as possible. This paper investigates whether the currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher accuracy in terms of explanatory power in the Champions League matches. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is encouraged to follow the example of the FIFA World Ranking and reform the calculation of the club coefficients in order to avoid unbalanced schedules in the novel tournament format of the Champions League.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_09078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula
Csató, László
Applications
Econometrics
62F07, 62P20
One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches. To guarantee that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength in the new design, it is crucial to forecast the performance of the teams before the tournament as well as possible. This paper investigates whether the currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher accuracy in terms of explanatory power in the Champions League matches. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is encouraged to follow the example of the FIFA World Ranking and reform the calculation of the club coefficients in order to avoid unbalanced schedules in the novel tournament format of the Champions League.
title Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula
topic Applications
Econometrics
62F07, 62P20
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09078