Relevelling the playing field: Football sweepstakes revisited
With UEFA Euro 2024 now in full swing let's revisit our earlier article on football sweepstakes. In it, we proposed a sweepstake where participants were assigned a shirt number, and they received points every time any player with a corresponding shirt scored.
The idea was that then all participants are invested in both teams in every match and consequently their interest in the sweepstake lasted throughout the tournament, unlike traditional ‘team’ sweepstakes where participants get knocked out each round.
Also, the number of points for each goal was awarded according to how likely that shirt number was to score, as follows:
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This resulted in the participants each having a similar chance of winning the sweepstake, unlike the traditional versions where those allocated the weaker teams could give up hope almost immediately. (You can read all the details about how the point system for the sweepstake was calculated in the earlier article.) Another positive feature is that the proposed sweepstake can be started at any point in the tournament. It doesn't matter if the tournament has already started. The goals from that point onwards can just be used.
Applying the proposed point system to previous World Cups, it was shown that the winners of the sweepstake would have been:
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We finished that article with a suggestion that including penalty shoot-outs would make the sweepstake even fairer and more engaging. So let's implement that now and see how it works!
Penalty Shootouts
The following table shows the number of penalties scored in World Cup penalty shoot-outs according to shirt number:
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Awarding 2 points per scored penalty, and adding those to the points obtained for in-game goals (as determined in the earlier article), the sweepstake winners for the previous World Cups would now be:
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This demonstrates more variety in the winners and supports our suggestion that awarding points for penalty shoot-outs will increase the fairness. And of course, by including the shoot-outs in the sweepstake, means we can enjoy the sweepstake for every shot of the game!
About the author
Slim Khan is an Analytics Consultant at Minitab, and is particularly interested in mathematics and statistics related to games and sports.