PageRank Approach to Ranking Football Teams' Network

Abstract

Football is one of the world's most favored sports with a huge amount of data that one could inspect, analyze and reach interesting conclusions. In this paper we analyze such football data made available through collecting via world football matches.. Our goal is to rank the teams not just based on directmatch result, but also considering team relationship. For this purpose, we apply the PageRank algorithms with restarting mechanismto a graph built from the games. Several statistics such as matches wining and goals scored are combined in different metrics with weights to the links in the graph. Finally, our results indicate that the Random walk approach with the use of right metrics can indeed produce relevant yet more meaningful rankings comparable to the official ranking.