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The Probabilistic Final Standing Calculator: a fair stochastic tool to handle abruptly stopped football seasons.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football leagues were suddenly stopped, and each country was hesitating between a relaunch of the competition and a premature ending. Some opted for the latter option and took as the final standing of the season the ranking from the moment the competition got interrupted. This decision has been perceived as unfair, especially by those teams who had remaining matches against easier opponents. In this paper, we introduce a tool to calculate in a fairer way the final standings of domestic leagues that have to stop prematurely: our Probabilistic Final Standing Calculator (PFSC). It is based on a stochastic model taking into account the results of the matches played and simulating the remaining matches, yielding the probabilities for the various possible final rankings. We have compared our PFSC with state-of-the-art prediction models, using previous seasons which we pretend to stop at different points in time. We illustrate our PFSC by showing how a probabilistic ranking of the French Ligue 1 in the stopped 2019-2020 season could have led to alternative, potentially fairer, decisions on the final standing.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10182-021-00416-6.

SUBMITTER: Van Eetvelde H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8355582 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:ImportanceRepetitive head impacts have been posited to contribute to neurocognitive and behavioral difficulties in contact sport athletes.ObjectiveTo identify associations between cognitive and behavioral outcomes and head impacts measured in youth tackle football players over 4 seasons of play.Design, setting, and participantsThis prospective cohort study was conducted from July 2016 through January 2020, spanning 4 football seasons. The setting was a youth tackle football program and outpatient medical clinic. Players were recruited from 4 football teams composed of fifth and sixth graders, and all interested players who volunteered to participate were enrolled. Data analysis was performed from March 2020 to June 2021.ExposuresImpacts were measured using helmet-based sensors during practices and games throughout 4 consecutive seasons of play. Impacts were summed to yield cumulative head impact gravitational force equivalents per season.Main outcomes and measuresTen cognitive and behavioral measures were completed before and after each football season.ResultsThere were 70 male participants aged 9 to 12 years (mean [SD] age, 10.6 [0.64] years), with 18 completing all 4 years of the study. At the post-season 1 time point, higher cumulative impacts were associated with lower self-reported symptom burden (β = -0.6; 95% CI, -1.0 to -0.2; P = .004). After correcting for multiple comparisons, no other associations were found between impacts and outcome measures. At multiple times throughout the study, premorbid attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression were associated with worse cognitive or behavioral scores, whereas a premorbid headache disorder or history of concussion was less often associated with outcomes.Conclusions and relevanceIn this cohort of youth tackle football players, premorbid conditions, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression, were associated with cognitive and behavioral outcomes more often than cumulative impact.

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The Probabilistic Final Standing Calculator: a fair stochastic tool to handle abruptly stopped football seasons.

Supplementary information

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