On Probabilistic Excitement of Sports Games

Jan Vecer, Ichiba Tomoyuki and Laudanovic Mladen
Additional contact information
Ichiba Tomoyuki: Department of Statistics, Columbia University
Laudanovic Mladen: Department of Statistics, Columbia University

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2007, vol. 3, issue 3, 23

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a quantitative measure of the excitement of sports games. This measure can be thought of as the variability of the expectancy of winning as a game progresses. We illustrate the concept of excitement at soccer games for which the theoretical win expectancy can be well approximated from a Poisson model of scoring. We show that in the Poisson model, higher scoring rates lead to increased expected excitement. Given a particular strength of a team, the most exciting games are expected with opponents who are slightly stronger. We apply this theory to the FIFA World Cup 2006 games, where the winning expectancy was independently estimated by betting markets. Thus, it was possible to compute the expected and the realized excitement of each given game from the trading data.

Keywords: excitement; win expectancy; Markov model of scoring; intensity of scoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1559-0410.1066 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:3:y:2007:i:3:n:6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jqas/html

DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1066

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is currently edited by Mark Glickman

More articles in Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().