Assessing competitive balance in the English Premier League for over forty seasons using a stochastic block model

Abstract Competitive balance is of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. We develop a statistical network model based on an extension stochastic block to assess between teams league. represent outcome all matches football season as dense with nodes identified by categorical edges representing each game win, draw, or loss. The main focus motivation for this paper issue competitive context English First Division / Premier League over more than 40 seasons. Our analysis provides evidence suggesting structural change around early 2000s from reasonably balanced league two-tier