Analysis of the importance of on-field covariates in the German Bundesliga

In modern football, various variables as, for example, the distance a team runs or its percentage of ball possession, are collected throughout a match. However, there is a lack of methods to make use of these on-field variables simultaneously and to connect them with the final result of the match. This paper considers data from the German Bundesliga season 2015/2016. The objective is to identify the on-field variables that are connected to the sportive success or failure of the single teams. An extended Bradley–Terry model for football matches is proposed that is able to take into account on-field covariates. Penalty terms are used to reduce the complexity of the model and to find clusters of teams with equal covariate effects. The model identifies the running distance to be the on-field covariate that is most strongly connected to the match outcome.