Italian Serie A - Israeli Premier League Comparative Analysis

Football leagues around the world differ in style of play and in the level of play. Given an ability to isolate the parameters in which these differences are reflected, moreover, doing so in relation to match outcome, professionals in lower-tier leagues can give greater importance to these parameters in their work in order to raise the level of play. In this study, a comparison between the Italian Serie A (top tier) and Israeli Premier League (low tier) was performed, seeking for general differences and comparing match outcome driving parameters in both leagues. Finally, an attempt to built an “On the Ball Metrics” based match outcome prediction model was performed using various machine learning techniques. The data used in order to perform the mentioned above analysis consisted of summarized team data from 760 Serie A matches and 480 Israeli Premier League (IPL) matches. the data was provided by Instat ltd. Data for a single match contained values from 455 different parameters. Our findings show significant differences were found in 54 out of 128 predictors, showing the vast differences in quality of performance between the leagues. Differences were detected in parameters related to quality of ball movement, attacking efficiency and action speed. When extracting match outcome driving parameters for each of the leagues, we found vast common ground between the two subsets, inferring that the difference between the two leagues origin first and foremost from the quality of performance and not from emphasizing different aspects of the game. The match outcome drivers found in our analysis can be referred to categories such as ball possession, key actions, quality of performance and ball retrieval.