Better than the Premier League: Maths meets Footy, a talk by Professor David Firth (University of Warwick and the Alan Turing Institute)
Abstract
It’s May. The football league tables are all finished. Those tables don’t lie: top team wins the league, bottom teams get relegated. But during the season, the “official” ranking is often misleading. It neglects: games in hand; which teams have played more matches at home than away; and that some teams have faced easy or hard fixtures just by chance. But here’s a maths recipe that produces the “right” league table, week by week during the season. I show how it works, and why – both mathematically and intuitively – it is the best way to make football league tables more informative.
No charge is made to attend meetings; non-IMA members are welcome.
Download the event poster: Firth, 28May19 (pdf)
