Why do people build football models using poissons distribut

Football, Soccer - whatever you call it. It is the beautiful game.
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cyxstudio
Posts: 297
Joined: Sun Mar 23, 2014 11:18 pm

Why do people build football models using poissons distribution? Poissons distribution assumes that each event is independent of another, which is not true in football. Doesn't that make the model flawed?
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xitian
Posts: 457
Joined: Fri Jul 08, 2011 2:08 pm

The Poisson distribution is a good place to start when modelling goals, but like you say it is flawed. There are plenty of excellent research papers on the topic and improving the accuracy of the model, so they are worth reading. But at the end of the day, it's exactly what it is - a model. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. You just have to be able to discern more information than the market (which isn't easy mind you).

But depending on what you want to do, and your strategy based off your model, varying levels of accuracy might be needed.
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