Which sport is becoming more predictable? A cross-discipline analysis of predictability in team sports

Abstract

Professional sports are a cultural activity beloved by many, and a global hundred-billion-dollar industry. In this paper, we investigate the trends of match outcome predictability, assuming that the public is more interested in an event if there is some uncertainty about who will win. We reproduce previous methodology focused on soccer and we expand it by analyzing more than 300,000 matches in the 1996-2023 period from nine disciplines, to identify which disciplines are getting more/less predictable over time. We investigate the home advantage effect, since it can affect outcome predictability and it has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Going beyond previous work, we estimate which sport management model – between the egalitarian one popular in North America and the rich-get-richer used in Europe – leads to more uncertain outcomes. Our results show that there is no generalized trend in predictability across sport disciplines, that home advantage has been decreasing independently from the pandemic, and that sports managed with the egalitarian North American approach tend to be less predictable. We base our result on a predictive model that ranks team by analyzing the directed network of who-beats-whom, where the most central teams in the network are expected to be the best performing ones. Our results are robust to the measure we use for the prediction.