Artículo de revista
An analytics approach to the FIFA ranking procedure and the World Cup final draw
Fecha
2020Registro en:
Annals of Operations Research (2020) 286:119–146
10.1007/s10479-019-03261-8
Autor
Cea, Sebastián
Durán, Guillermo
Guajardo, Mario
Sauré Valenzuela, Denis
Siebert Sandoval, Joaquín
Zamorano, Gonzalo
Institución
Resumen
This paper analyzes the procedure used by FIFA up until 2018 to rank national football
teams and define by random draw the groups for the initial phase of the World Cup finals.
A predictive model is calibrated to form a reference ranking to evaluate the performance of
a series of simple changes to that procedure. These proposed modifications are guided by a
qualitative and statistical analysis of the FIFA ranking. We then analyze the use of this ranking
to determine the groups for the World Cup finals. After enumerating a series of deficiencies
in the group assignments for the 2014 World Cup, a mixed integer linear programming model
is developed and used to balance the difficulty levels of the groups.