Predicting Football Outcomes by Using Poisson Model: Applied to Spanish Primera División

Abstract

During the past decades, sport, in general, has become one of the most powerful competitions and the most popular in the world. As well, everyone is waiting for the winner and who will be the champion in the end in different tournaments. Among these sports, football's popularity is higher than all other sports. Football match results prediction, as well as the champion in various competitions, has been seriously studied in recent years. Moreover, it has become an interesting field for many researchers. In this work, the Poisson model has been presented to predict the winner, draw, and loser of the football matches. The method is applied to the Spanish Primera División (First Division) in 2016–2017; the data has been downloaded from the football-data.co.uk website, which will be used to find the prediction accuracy.