A football player rating system

Abstract

Association football (soccer) is the most popular sport in the world, resulting in a large economic interest from investors, team managers, and betting agencies. For this reason, a vast number of rating systems exists to assess the strength of football teams or individual players. Nevertheless, most of the existing approaches incorporate deficiencies, e. g., that they depend on subjective ratings from experts. The objective of this work was the development of a new rating system for determining the playing strength of football players. The Elo algorithm, which has established itself as an objective and adaptive rating system in numerous individual sports, has been expanded in accordance with the requirements of team sports. Matches from 16 different European domestic leagues, the UEFA Champions and Europa Leagues have been recorded, with more than 17 000 matches played in recent years, and 12 400 different players. The developed rating system produced promising results, when evaluating the matches based on its predictions. A high relevance of the created system results from the fact that only the associated match report is needed and thus—in relation to existing valuation models—significantly more football players can be assessed.