Centre for Sports Business events

Centre for Sports Business events provide opportunities for open debate, shape business agendas, and establish research priorities.

Upcoming events

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SEMINAR: Real-time forecasting in football matches (and in other sports)

Speaker: Dr Soudeep Deb, Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru
Open to: Any staff and students, with no sign up needed
Date: Thursday 11 December 2025
Time: 12-1pm
In person: Management School, Marketing Suite

Abstract:

Within-match forecasting is an attractive statistical problem in sports. In this talk, we shall focus on a new Bayesian technique that we have proposed for providing real-time forecasts in football.

We utilise sequential data of various events throughout the match in a multinomial probit regression framework to estimate the time-varying impact of covariates and to forecast the outcome.

Different evaluation metrics establish that the proposed model outperforms potential competitors inspired by existing statistical or machine learning algorithms. Additionally, we apply robustness checks to demonstrate the model’s accuracy across various scenarios.

Subsequently, we shall also present the cases of two other sports – tennis and cricket – and show how different techniques (such as LASSO-induced logistic regression and time-series classification) can be adopted for within-match forecasting in these cases.

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