Forecasting Soccer Market Tendencies Using Link Prediction

摘要

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and due its popularity, soccer moves billions of euros over the years, in most diverse forms, such as marketing, merchandising, TV quotas and players transfers. As example, in the 2016/2017 season, only England has moved about 1.3 billion of euros only in players transfers. In this work, it is performed a study of the transfer market of players and, to do so, players transfer data were gathered from the website Transfermarkt and transfers were modeled as a graph. In order to perform this study, different Complex Networks techniques were applied, such as Link Prediction, Community Detection and Centrality Analysis. Link Prediction it was possible to conceive a network of a forecast market for the 2022 World Cup using temporal data. Through the generated network it was possible to notice changes of the market and the rise of Asian countries, given a notion of how the market is going to behave in the next years.