Ranking of Sports Teams via the AHP

Abstract

This paper presents an application of the analytic hierarchy approach (AHP) to predict the ranking of the 16 soccer teams of the Israeli National League. Six criteria (attributes) were used for evaluating each team: the team's facility, the team's trainer, the players' level, the team's fans, the previous season's performance and the current performance. For each criterion a matrix of pairwise comparisons between teams was evaluated by a sports expert. The normalized eigenvector of each matrix scales the teams with regard to that criterion. The overall scaling is constructed by weighting the scales of all the criteria. The weight of the criteria are extracted from a judgemental matrix of pairwise comparisons between every two criteria. The normalized eigenvector of this matrix provides the criteria weights. Some comparisons to simpler ranking methods were made in order to validate the model.