Bayesian hierarchical model for the prediction of football results

The problem of modelling football data has become increasingly popular in the last few years and many different models have been proposed with the aim of estimating the characteristics that bring a team to lose or win a game, or to predict the score of a particular match. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to address both these aims and test its predictive strength on data about the Italian Serie A 1991-1992 championship. To overcome the issue of overshrinkage produced by the Bayesian hierarchical model, we specify a more complex mixture model that results in better fit to the observed data. We test its performance using an example about the Italian Serie A 2007-2008 championship.