Intrinsic classes in the Union of European Football Associations soccer team ranking

• Authors: Marcel Ausloos
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

A strong structural regularity of classes is found in soccer teams ranked by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) for the time interval 2009–2014. It concerns 424 to 453 teams according to the 5 competition seasons. The analysis is based on the rank-size theory considerations, the size being the UEFA coefficient at the end of a season. Three classes emerge: (i) the few ”top” teams, (ii) 300 teams, (iii) the rest of the involved teams (about 150) in the tail of the distribution. There are marked empirical laws describing each class. A 3-parameter Lavalette function is used to describe the concave curving as the rank increases, and to distinguish the the tail from the central behavior.

Keywords

EN

team ranking; soccer; rank-size relation; Lavalette function; intrinsic complexity

• Publisher: De Gruyter Open
• Journal: Open Physics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 773-779

Dates

published

1 - 11 - 2014

online

17 - 8 - 2014

Contributors

author

Marcel Ausloos

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/s11534-014-0505-4