Predicting Final Result of Football Match Using Poisson Regression Model

Abstract

In any sport competition, there is a strong interest in knowing which team shall be the champion at the end of the championship and one of the sports is football. Football match predictions are of great interest to fans and sports press. In the last few years, it has been the focus of several studies. In this paper, the researchers propose Poisson regression model to predict the final result of football matches. The researchers predicted the average goals scored by each team by assuming that the number of goals scored by a team in a match followed a univariate Poisson distribution. Poisson regression model was formulated from four covariates: the goal average in a match, the home-team advantage, the team's offensive power, and the opponent team's defensive power. The methodology was applied to the 2017-2018 English Premier League. The results obtained using this model had a fairly good accuracy.