EPJ Data Science - View featured video: How teams and players stack up and why

Details

Published on 14 March 2017

“Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. Winning is a habit,” said legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi.

Human sports and games, with their rules of competition and measures of performance, serve as an ideal test-bed to look for universal features of hierarchy formation. In a recent article published in EPJ Data Science, José A. Morales and colleagues study the behaviour of performance rankings over time of players and teams for several sports and games, and find statistical regularities in the dynamics of ranks. This finding dispels the commonly held notion that rank changes are due to the intrinsic strengths or qualities of teams and players. The same phenomenon may apply to more complex competition settings with further examinations.

Read more in the highlight of this article.