A sports game is about competition. The competitiveness of a game is important in terms of fan interest. Teams ahead or behind in a non-competitive game may also be more likely to substitute reserve players to reduce risk of injury to key players or gain experience for lesser-used players. Changes in how a team plays in a non-competitive game also impact secondary competitions such as betting or fantasy sports due to player behavior changes in a non-competitive game.
This work examines the competitiveness of games in 6 professional sports leagues using a variety of metrics and finds that:
Major League Baseball (MLB) games are clearly the least competitive compared with games from each of the other leagues in our study. MLB games have the highest percentage of game segments that are played in less competitive situations. Major League Soccer and Barclay’s Premier League (BPL) games tend to be the most competitive in general; largely because about half of game time for these leagues is spent with the game tied. However, if a team does take the lead in one of these leagues then they, along with MLB, have the highest chance that this team will not relinquish the lead.
…3.5 Competitiveness based on predicted outcomes: Rather than use the known outcome of a game as we did for the previous two metrics, the last set of competitiveness metrics we investigate use the predicted likelihood of game outcomes. For this analysis we focus on the metric of whether a team is in the lead and is likely to stay ahead for good in the game…In general, the maps are as expected with a larger lead needed at the beginning of a game to have the same level of outcome certainty as later in the game. Looking at the maps for a few specific leagues, we see that at the mid-point of a game a MLB team ahead by 4 runs has at least a 80% chance of staying ahead for good. At this same point in the game, a MLB team leading by 6 runs has at least a 90% chance of staying in the lead for good and a MLB team in the lead by 9 runs has a 100% chance of staying in the lead for good based upon the data.
…Figure 11 summarizes the results in Figure 10 where 9% of game time in MLB and NBA games is a situation where the team that is ahead is 100% likely to stay ahead. If we look at at results for 80% likelihood of the outcome then MLB is by far the largest at 36% of game time with the NFL and MLS the smallest at 19% of game time. These summary results suggest that games in MLB are the least competitive, while those in the other leagues are more competitive using the 80% level of certainty.
…The outcome of these pairwise comparison of metric results is that games from MLB are clearly the least competitive compared with games from each of the other leagues in our study. MLB games have the highest percentage of game segments that are played in less competitive situations. MLS and BPL games tend to be the most competitive in general; largely because about half of game time for these leagues is spent with the game tied. However, if a team does take the lead in one of these leagues then they, along with MLB, have the highest chance that this team will not relinquish the lead. Results for the NFL and NHL show that they are neither relatively the most or least competitive. We believe variation in the competitiveness of the leagues occurs because of the nature of the sports in terms of how they are played and scored as well as the specific leagues themselves.