FiT Publishing

The “sophomore slump” is a widely accepted phenomenon in modern sport culture, commonly conceptualized as a decline in performance during a player’s second year of competition following an outstanding first season. This study empirically verified the absence of sophomore slump through a two-stage network data envelopment analysis and Malmquist productivity index analysis of 616 English Premier League players from the 2014–2015 to 2018–2019 seasons. The relative rankings of individual second-year players were compared with their rankings in the previous season, and second-year and non-...Read more

We present a complete betting strategy for football (soccer), and develop a free graphical user interface to apply it. We use betting odds to elicit the hyperparameters of our prior distributions that are mixed with historical records to estimate the probability of each outcome. Forecast probabilities are used to define the optimal bet size based on the Kelly Criterion and we establish a stopping rule for betting, based on atypical positive returns (referred to as “black swans”). We apply our method to the English Premier League, obtaining profits equal to 33.54%, 22.12%, and 49.01% for...Read more