| Skill, Strategy and Passion: an Empirical Analysis of Soccer (1998) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| Sports provide a natural experiment on individual choices in games with high stakes. We study a game-theoretic model of a soccer match and then evaluate the ability of this model to explain actual behavior with data from 2885 matches among professional teams. In our model, the optimal strategy of a team depends on the current state of the game. When the game is tied, both teams attack. When losing, a team always attacks; when winning, it may attack early in the game, but starts defending as the end of the match nears. We find that teams' skills, current score, and home field advantage are significant explanatory variables of the probability of scoring. We also find that when losing a team becomes relatively more likely to score. A team which is ahead, on the other hand, uses a conservative strategy very early in the match. These results support the main conclusions of our model. They indicate that soccer teams behave consistently with rationality and equilibrium. However, we find a strong and significant interaction between home field advantage and strategic behavior. This may be evidence that psychological factors are important in determining the game's outcome. | |||||||||||||||
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