Soccer Analytics - Forecast Quality

The main objective of the model is to forecast the final table. It is not expected that the final table can be predicted exactly. Every season has its own surprises and disappointments. To check how good our forecast was last season, we compare our forecast with the tips from many other forecasts collected on the BStat homepage. All of these predict the ranks of the final table. We calculate the rank correlation coefficient with the real final table and the respective forecasts. The closer a forecast was to the truth, the higher this value. Our forecast method reached the fourth position in the 2018/19 season. Guessing the exact position is often a matter of luck, especially in a narrow league like the Bundesliga. Therefore, we additionally look at the forecast quality for expected points using the root mean squared error. This quality measure is smaller the closer the forecast is to the actual points. In this category, our forecast again performs very good.
In the table "Coach dismissals 2017/18" all released coaches of the Bundesliga season 2017/18 are listed with the standardized deviation of the points to our forecast at the time of their dismissal. All coaches were dismissed with negative deviations. We regard this as evidence that the managers of the Bundesliga teams apply similar standards as our model.

In the 2016/17 season, our forecast was only beaten by Spiegel Online in predicting the rankings.

In season 2015/16 our predictions were at least as good as all considered competitors.