The Strain of Success: A Predictive Model for Injury Risk Mitigation and Team Success in Soccer

In this paper, we present a novel sequential team selection model in soccer. Specifically, we model the stochastic process of player injury and unavailability using player-specific information learned from real-world soccer data. Monte-Carlo Tree Search is used to select teams for games that optimise long-term team performance across a soccer season by reasoning over player injury probability. We validate our approach compared to benchmark solutions for the 2018/19 English Premier League season. Our model achieves similar season expected points to …

cs.ai cs.lg data games information monte-carlo novel paper predictive process risk search soccer stochastic stochastic process success team teams tree world