Dynamic rating of European football teams

^** Formerly Knorr-Held. Email: held{at}stat.uni-muenchen.de In this paper we apply and extend recently proposed methodsfor the dynamic analysis of pairwise comparison data to Europeanfootball teams. Our statistical model is based on the cumulativelogistic link model with time-changing parameters for the strengthof each team. We jointly analyse the results from the five topEuropean leagues from 1996 to 2001 and all international matchesbetween teams from these leagues. We introduce weights for internationalmatches and also allow for a different size of the home teamadvantage in the different leagues. We suggest that the resultsfrom such an analysis may be taken as an alternative to theUEFA coefficient, which is currently used to determine the numberof teams from each league to take part in the European footballcontests.