Spanish Football

The authors analyze the financial situation of the Spanish football industry. They first argue that a relevant analysis of the industry's financial results relies on a careful description of how historical and cultural factors have influenced its organization. Moreover, they stress the important relationship between the industry and television. The authors suggest that the situation of the Spanish football industry suffers from some structural weaknesses in its accounts. However, the situation seems less severe than in other major European football leagues, partly because local authorities in Spain have strong incentives to back football teams.Publicad

Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-agent Adversarial Games

An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this dissertation, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our approach for both offline play generation and real-time team response in the Rush 2008 American football simulator. Simultaneously predicting the movement trajectories, future reward, and play strategies of multiple players in real-time is a daunting task but we illustrate how it is possible to divide and conquer this problem with an assortment of data-driven models. By leveraging spatio-temporal traces of player movements, we learn discriminative models of defensive play for opponent modeling. With the reward information from previous play matchups, we use a modified version of UCT (Upper Conference Bounds applied to Trees) to create new offensive plays and to learn play repairs to counter predicted opponent actions. iii In team games, players must coordinate effectively to accomplish tasks while foiling their opponents either in a preplanned or emergent manner. An effective team policy must generate the necessary coordination, yet considering all possibilities for creating coordinating subgroups is computationally infeasible. Automatically identifying and preserving the coordination between key subgroups of teammates can make search more productive by pruning policies that disrupt these relationships. We demonstrate that combining opponent modeling with automatic subgroup identification can be used to create team policies with a higher average yardage than either the baseline game or domain-specific heuristics

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

'Home game': domestic abuse and football

Increased reports of domestic violence and abuse (DVA) following football matches have been documented, within both quantitative studies and the media, leading to questions about the policy and practice responses required. However, qualitative research facilitating understanding of the apparent link between football and DVA is lacking. Drawing upon research with key stakeholders across England and Scotland, this paper provides a rare insight into their understanding of the contested and complex relationship between football and DVA, including the role of contributory and confounding factors such as alcohol, match expectations, masculinity, entitlement and permissions. It is argued that while football may provide a potential platform for challenging DVA, focusing on football (or other specific factors or events) as causative risks re-incidentalising DVA and detaching it from feminist frameworks that have established DVA as a sustained behaviour grounded in gendered inequalities. This paper concludes by considering the broader conceptual implications of these findings for future research, policy and practice

UK security breach investigations report: an analysis of data compromise cases

This report, rather than relying on questionnaires and self-reporting, concerns cases that were investigated by the forensic investigation team at 7Safe. Whilst removing any inaccuracies arising from self-reporting, the authors acknowledge that the limitation of the sample size remains. It is hoped that the unbiased reporting by independent investigators has yielded interesting facts about modern security breaches. All data in this study is based on genuine completed breach investigations conducted by the compromise investigation team over the last 18 months

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF FOREIGNER RULES IN NATIONAL SPORTS LEAGUES

Profitable and balanced domestic league sports are among the central prerequisites for attracting the right to host a mega-event like the soccer world cup as well as for the overall economic success of such events. This paper provides a contest model of a professional team sports league and analyzes the impact of a restriction on foreign players. It shows that a league with binding restrictions on foreign talent for all clubs is more balanced than a league without binding restrictions on foreign talent. Moreover, the wage level of domestic (foreign) talent is higher (lower) in a league with a binding restriction on foreign players. Finally, a tighter restriction on foreign players increases profits of all clubs.TEAM SPORTS LEAGUES, COMPETITIVE BALANCE, PLAYER SALARIES

Data-driven evaluation of on-field player performance in football using sensor and video technologies

Data has become increasingly relevant and used in football over the years. Technological development has made it possible to gather data from various aspects of the game. However, despite the growing popularity of sports analytics, relatively little research, especially qualitative, has been done on the topic. The purpose of this thesis is to create understanding and practices for taking advance of data for evaluation of on-field player performance in football using sensor and video technologies. This is done by identifying and combining technological possibilities with sports knowledge and suggesting an approach for data-driven evaluation of the on-field player performance. Review of previous literature and semi-structured theme interviews have been used as a method to achieve the purpose of the thesis. The findings of the thesis show that data can be used in the evaluation of on-field player performance in football by assessing players’ physical, technical, tactical, and mental attributes. These attributes have several different metrics, the value of which depends on several factors such as the team's objectives. Furthermore, an approach is presented in the thesis which suggests that the selection of team-specific attributes and metrics guides the user to consider which data is needed to be able to evaluate the desired metrics, which then can be linked to certain technologies and analytical solutions presented in the thesis