Bodnár Gergely — Csató László

How to better measure team strength in the Champions League. An important message to the European Football Confederation

The tournament format of the UEFA Champions League, the most prestigious European football competition, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: instead of the home-away round-robin contest played in eight traditional groups of four teams, there will be only one league where the 36 clubs play four matches at home and four away. Since each club will be ranked based on its eight matches, choosing the set of opponents will have a crucial importance. Therefore, a fundamental issue will be to accurately predict the future performance of the teams, which has inspired our research. In particular, we examine with logistic regression models whether an Elo rating, reflecting all results in the previous seasons, is able to outperform the currently used performance indicator, the UEFA club coefficient. As the Elo method is currently used to calculate the FIFA World Ranking and it turns out to be a better predictor, UEFA is strongly encouraged to reform the calculation of its club coefficient in order to reduce the effect of unbalanced matchings.

LXX. évf., 2023. July (813 - 827. O.), DOI:10.18414/KSZ.2023.7-8.813, Study

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