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arXiv · 1403.7993

A Markovian model for association football possession and its outcomes

Javier López Peña
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Abstract

We propose a bottom-up approach to the study of possession and its outcomes for association football, based on probabilistic finite state automata with transition probabilities described by a Markov process. We show how even a very simple model yields faithful approximations to the distribution of passing sequences and chances of taking shots for English Premier League teams, which we fit using a whole season of granular game data (380 games). We compare the resulting model with classical top-down distributions traditionally used to describe possessions, showing that the Markov models yield a more accurate asymptotic behaviour.

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Javier López Peña. 2014-03-31. A Markovian model for association football possession and its outcomes. https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.7993

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