Africa Cup of Nations- the Odds of Retaining Glory

Abstract

This article focusses on describing the odds of the Africa Cup of Nations edition champions retaining the cup in the next edition using the percentage of players recruited to defend the cup that were also recruited in the previous edition, and whether the coach in the previous edition is retained or not. The paper considers the editions in the period from 1992 to 2017 to come up with a description of the odds. Only 11 records are considered. Since the sample is small, bootstrapping is used (case-resampling with resampling done 1000 times). Logistic regression model is fit using penalised maximum likelihood (to avoid bias due to using small samples). Results show that the expected odds of the champions retaining the cup when they have not retained any player and the coach who were recruited in the previous edition are about 1.850 to 3.031. For every 1% of players who participated in previous edition and are retained, the expected odds of retaining the cup decrease by about 94.12% to 95.08%. When the coach in the previous edition is retained the expected odds of the team retaining the cup are about 343.31% to 462.21% higher than when the coach is not retained. The difference in odds of retaining the cup in cases where a coach is retained and a coach is not retained is not significant when about 77.19% or more of the players who won the cup in the previous edition are recruited.