SSAC24: The Strain of Success: A Predictive Model for Injury Mitigation and Team Success in Soccer
Research Paper Title: The Strain of Success: A Predictive Model for Injury Risk Mitigation and Team Success in Soccer
Abstract: Player injuries in soccer significantly impact team performance, club financial stability and player welfare, with the ‘Big Five’ European soccer leagues experiencing a staggering £513 million in injury-related costs during the 2021/22 season. In this paper, we present a novel forward-looking team selection model, framed as a Markov decision process and optimised with Monte Carlo tree search, that balances team performance with the risk of long-term player unavailability due to injury. We demonstrate that real-world teams could reduce the incidence of player injury by ~13% and wages inefficiently spent on injured players by ~11% using our data-driven team selection model.