Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 12: Statistical physics (general)
DY 12.8: Talk
Tuesday, March 27, 2007, 11:45–12:00, H3
Football fever: goal distributions in football — •Andreas Nußbaumer1, Elmar Bittner1, Wolfhard Janke1, and Martin Weigel2 — 1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Leipzig, Postfach 100 920, 04009 Leipzig, Germany — 2Department of Mathematics, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, Scotland, UK
Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. It turns out that in particular the tails of the distributions are not well described by independent Bernoulli trials, but rather well modeled by negative binomial or generalized extreme value distributions. To understand this behavior from first principles, we suggest to modify the Bernoulli random process to include a simple component of self-affirmation which seems to describe the data surprisingly well and allows to interpret the observed deviation from Gaussian statistics. The phenomenological distributions used before can be understood as special cases within this framework. We analyzed historical football score data from many leagues in Europe as well as from international tournaments and found the proposed models to be applicable rather universally. In particular, here we compare men’s and women’s leagues and the separate German leagues during the cold war times and find some remarkable differences.