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Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula

László Csató

arXiv 18 Apr 2023 · Statistics — Applications · publishedInternational Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport (2023) · 25 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2304.09078 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches. To guarantee that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength in the new design, it is crucial to forecast the performance of the teams before the tournament as well as possible. This paper investigates whether the currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher accuracy in terms of explanatory power in the Champions League matches. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is encouraged to follow the example of the FIFA World Ranking and reform the calculation of the club coefficients in order to avoid unbalanced schedules in the novel tournament format of the Champions League.

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1FIFA (2018) Revision of the FIFA / Coca-Cola World Ranking0.73732100%
2Corona, F., Forrest, D., Tena, J. D., and Wiper, M (2019) Bayesian forecasting of UEFA Champions League under alternative seeding regimes0.64422100%
3Csató, L (2020) The UEFA Champions League seeding is not strategy-proof since the 2015/16 season0.64422100%
4Csató, L (2022) UEFA against the champions? An evaluation of the recent reform of the Champions League qualification0.64422100%
5Dagaev, D. and Rudyak, V (2019) Seeding the UEFA Champions League participants: Evaluation of the reform0.64422100%
6Szczecinski, L. and Roatis, I.-I (2022) FIFA ranking: Evaluation and path forward0.64422100%
7Triguero-Ruiz, F. and Avila-Cano, A (2023) On competitive balance in the group stage of the UEFA Champions League0.64422100%
8UEFA (2018) How the club coefficients are calculated0.64422100%
9UEFA (2022) UEFA approves final format and access list for its club competitions as of the 2024/25 season0.51121100%
10Allison, P (2013) What's the best R-squared for logistic regression0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 47 scored citations.