We present a new, simple knockout format for sports tournaments, that we call “Choose Your Opponent”, where the teams have performed best during preliminary group stage can choose their opponents subsequent stage. The main benefit of this is it essentially solves recently identified incentive compatibility problem when more than one from advance to stage, by effectively canceling risk tanking. ...

As RoboCup continues its march towards the day when robots play soccer against people, the focus of researchers’ efforts is slowly shifting from low-level systems (vision, motion, self-localization, etc) to high-level systems such as strategy and cooperation. In the Four-Legged League (recently renamed to the Standard Platform League), teams are still struggling with this transition. While the ...

The SPL robot soccer league focuses its efforts on the development of robot control software for standard humanoid robots. Nevertheless, few interchange of software modules are observed in the league, being the B-Human effort an exception. In addition, a large difference in performance is observed between experienced teams and new teams. This situation makes difficult the incorporation of new t...

Hiroaki Kitano from the Sony Research Laboratories presents the latest developments in the world robotic soccer competition known as RoboCup. New initiatives for RoboCup include the Sony Dog (Aibo) league, the recent developments in humanoid ro!?otics, and programs such as RoboCup Rescue. RoboCup is a worldwide initiative to foster research into artificial intelligence and cooperative robotics....

Corporate sponsorship is a common phenomenon in major soccer leagues worldwide. Studies the area of sports decision-making have been done from global context but lack focus on particular sport or league. Little empirical evidence has emerged factors. The purpose this study to determine factors considered by corporate organizations availing clubs Kenya Premier League. determined influence team-b...

In this paper, we show a new technique to analyze families of rankings. In particular, we focus on sports rankings and, more precisely, on soccer leagues. We consider that two teams compete when they change their relative positions in consecutive rankings. This allows to define a graph by linking teams that compete. We show how to use some structural properties of this competitivity graph to me...

Since 2005, Chile’s professional soccer league has used a game-scheduling system based on an integer linear programming model. The Chilean league managers have considered several criteria for the last tournaments’ scheduling, involving operational, economic and sporting factors, thus generating a highly constrained problem, in practice unsolvable by their last methodology. This led to the adopt...

I model a scoring situation that arises frequently during soccer matches. The Nash equilibrium solution is shown to be broadly consistent with the conventional wisdom of experts. Data on goals scored over an entire season in Italy’s soccer league provide statistical support for a prediction of the model’s Nash equilibrium. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Humanoid soccer serves as a benchmark problem for artificial intelligence research and robotics. Every year, more teams are competing, for example, in the RoboCup Humanoid League. As the robots improve in the basic skills of walking, kicking, and getting up, teams can focus on soccer skills and team coordination. The complexity of soccer behaviors and team play calls for structured behavior eng...

the aim of this study was to design a program to educate emotion management and to evaluate its effectiveness on controlling anger and mental health in soccer players. the method of this study was quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest with control group. the population consisted of all players of soccer teams in adult premier league in 2014. 40 players of soccer teams in premier league were sele...