Predictive Efficacy of a New Association Football League Format in Polish Ekstraklasa

In this study we investigate the recently introduced competition format for the top association football division in Poland (similar to one used in, e.g., Belgium and Kazakhstan). We compare it to the double round-robin tournament which is the most prevalent league format among European leagues. In a simulation study we show that the new league format has better ability to determine the strongest competitor as the winner of a league as well as it yields higher correlation with theoretical latent teams’ strength parameters in the model.