Dynamic rating of European football teams

In this paper we apply and extend recently proposed methods for the dynamic analysis of pairwise comparison data to European football teams. Our statistical model is based on the cumulative logistic link model with time-changing parameters for the strength of each team. We jointly analyse the results from the five top European leagues from 1996 to 2001 and all international matches between teams from these leagues. We introduce weights for international matches and also allow for a different size of the home team advantage in the different leagues. We suggest that the results from such an analysis may be taken as an alternative to the UEFA coefficient, which is currently used to determine the number of teams from each league to take part in the European football contests.