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Monday, December 28, 2020

Simulation of scheduled football matches

In this post I try to answer a few readers questions about the simulation system I use. At the same time I describe my research on possible improvements in the probability distribution functions I use in my simulation system.

Why simulate ?

The purpose of a simulation of football matches is to provide probabilities for each team, participating in a scheme of scheduled matches, to reach certain feats. The feats can be anything from just winning a single match to winning a group in a tournament or win the whole tournament. Also, because each scheduled match gets a result assigned to it during the simulation, dependent facts can be quantified, such as the resulting FIFA points (and thus the resulting ranking) of all participating teams after the scheduled matches are 'played'.

Saturday, December 5, 2020

FIFA ranking: December 2020 final preview

Here is the final preview of the December 2020 ranking. FIFA will publish this ranking next Thursday December 10th. 

Yesterday Qatar played the only Asian World Cup qualifier in 2020 against Bangladesh and won 5:0. I expect a small reshuffle of Qatar's remaining two qualfiiers to March next year so that they will have their hands free in June to prepare properly for the Copa America. In July they will also play the Gold Cup where they somehow managed to get invited. 

It seems everything is possible when you got money to throw at people. For instance robbing a spot in a final tournament on another continent at the cost of a team that's still in a qualification process to get there. Disgusting.. and then still be indignant that you are not 'loved' in the world. Will they ever learn ?