Predictive Models of English Premier League Goal Scoring
Quang Nguyen
Wittenberg University
Spring 2020
1 Abstract
The English Premier League is well-known for being not only one of the most-watched football leagues in the world but also one of the toughest competitions to predict. The purpose of this research project was to look at goal scoring data of the English Premier League and use statistical modeling to predict Premier League match results. This research will attempt to determine whether goal scoring in the Premier League can be modeled by a Poisson process, specifically, the relationships between the number of goals and the Poisson distribution, the time between goals and the exponential distribution, and positions of goal data points and the continuous uniform distribution. It turns out to be that the Poisson process and the three families of distributions do perform a great job of describing Premier League goal scoring. In addition to this, various models of predicting a Premier League season’s results based on different sets of data will be observed and compared, with a large number of simulations being involved in each method.