Resumen de Probabilities in the Soccer League

Ignacio Díaz-Emparanza , Vicente A. Núñez Antón

• We consider the problem of using the points a given team has in the First division Spanish Soccer League to estimate its probabilities of achieving a speci c objective, such as, for example, staying in the rst division or playing the European Champions League.

  We wondered why some speci c sports journalists indicate that a team in the rst division guarantees its staying in that division if it has a total of forty two points at the end of the regular season. We describe the speci c theoretical probability model using the multinomial distribution and, then, introduce two approximations to compute the probability of interest, as well as the exact method. The di erent proposed methods are then evaluated and also applied to the example that motivated them. One interesting result is that the predicted probabilities can then be dynamically evaluated by using data from the current soccer competition.