Is A Social Network Approach Relevant To Football Results?

We study the relevance of considering social network analysis in determining soccer results. As a benchmark, we start using a simple regression model based on past performance to try to determine the main trends of a soccer match based on probabilities of winning, losing or tying, as home or visiting teams. The success of this simple model, based on historical performance, is improved by the addition of network descriptors of both teams in a game. Therefore, such network measures do offer additional useful information in determining match outcomes. We validate our approach using the data of the Spanish League (La Liga) 2012-2013. We observe that betweenness centrality seems to provide additional relevance information related to the performance of a team during the tournament. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.