Abstract

SANT'ANNA, Annibal Parracho  and  MELLO, João Carlos Correia Baptista Soares de. Validating rankings in soccer championships. Pesqui. Oper. [online]. 2012, vol.32, n.2, pp. 407-422.  Epub June 21, 2012. ISSN 0101-7438.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0101-74382012005000012.

The final ranking of a championship is determined by quality attributes combined with other factors which should be filtered out of any decision on relegation or draft for upper level tournaments. Factors like referees' mistakes and difficulty of certain matches due to its accidental importance to the opponents should have their influence reduced. This work tests approaches to combine classification rules considering the imprecision of the number of points as a measure of quality and of the variables that provide reliable explanation for it. Two home-advantage variables are tested and shown to be apt to enter as explanatory variables. Independence between the criteria is checked against the hypothesis of maximal correlation. The importance of factors and of composition rules is evaluated on the basis of correlation between rank vectors, number of classes and number of clubs in tail classes. Data from five years of the Brazilian Soccer Championship are analyzed.

Keywords : soccer; performance management; probability.