As inequality increases in European football, the sport is becoming more predictable

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-12-15 11:01

International

Photo by Mitch Rosen on Unsplash

Increasing financial inequality among Europe's biggest football leagues could be killing the unpredictability of matches, according to international research. To investigate claims the game is losing the element of surprise as the rich clubs get richer, the researchers analysed the past 26 years of matches across 11 major leagues to look for changes in unexpected outcomes and home ground advantage. The researchers say it is now easier to predict a result than it used to be and home teams are slowly but steadily losing their advantage, with more research needed to determine the impact increasing wealth gaps between clubs is having on this.

News release

From: The Royal Society

It’s never coming home - Football is becoming more predictable. Researchers analysed 88,000 matches from 11 major European leagues, and also found inequality between teams has increased while home-field advantage is vanishing. With wealthier teams building increasingly expensive and talented rosters, the authors recommend future work should assess the role money plays in removing the surprise element of the sport.

Football is becoming more predictable; Network analysis of 88 thousands matches in 11 major leagues
Royal Society Open Science

In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. Here for the first time, we report on historical trends in the predictability of football over 26 years in major European leagues. We show that over time, the games in major leagues have indeed become more predictable. We provide further support for this observation by showing that inequality between teams has increased and the home-field advantage has been vanishing ubiquitously.

Attachments

Note: Not all attachments are visible to the general public. Research URLs will go live after the embargo ends.

Research The Royal Society, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: Royal Society Open Science

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Oxford, UK

Funder: T.Y. was partially supported by the Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant no. EP/N510129/1.

Media Contact/s

Contact details are only visible to registered journalists.