Page 28 - KVIS Book

MAT01I

Predicting the Outcomes of Association Football Match

Phumrapee Pisutsin, Atibodee Champathes
Kamnoetvidya Science Academy, Thailand
Supervisor: Thanaporn Thanodomdech
Email: phumrapee_p@kvis.ac.th

Nowadays, association football is the most popular sport in the world. The most
popular tournament of football is UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations)
Champions League gathering highly-ranked European teams from all European
countries and millions of passionate sport fans. Some fans encounter problems about
funding themselves on their journey to the football stadium in other countries. The
prediction of the football match results would help the football fans to decide on their
budget whether attending the game or not. This study is mainly about creating a
prediction model for each match in result in UEFA champions league in the form of
probability of each outcome and each specific score. Maximum likelihood is used for
analyzing the data in the previous season in each national league, and Poisson
distribution is used for creating the prediction model based on some parameters. The
parameters that are used in this model based on the quality of the league as measured
by UEFA and team performance in offensive game, defensive game and advantages of
playing in their own stadium.

Keywords: Association football, Modelling, Prediction, Poisson Distribution, Maximum
Likelihood Estimation