An introduction to modeling soccer

The increased data in sports has provided statisticians with the tools to build models of sporting events. This talk will look to show how data from soccer matches can be used to create models with the ability to predict upcoming matches. Starting from a very simple approach we will show how a modified Poisson approach is able to characterise the dynamics of the beautiful game. Following from the model definition we fit it on data from England and show how the output can be used in predicting games from the English Premier League.