A general paired comparison model for the evaluation of sports competitions
is proposed. It efficiently uses the available information by allowing
for ordered response categories and team-specific home advantage effects.
Penalized estimation techniques are used to identify clusters of teams that
share the same ability. The model is extended to include team-specific
explanatory variables. It is shown that regularization techniques allow to
identify the contribution of explanatory variables to the success of teams.
The usefulness of the methods is demonstrated by investigating the performance
and its dependence on the budget for football teams of the German
Bundesliga