arXiv:2608. 09887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ball possession is the most-cited and most-misleading number in football: 60% recycled in one's own half is not 60% spent pinning the opponent back.
By Seongjin Choi
arXiv:2607. 14616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision--language models have become increasingly capable of interpreting visual scenes, but it remains unclear whether they can use information to make strategically effective decisions.
By Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Haotian Xia, Akshaya Bharadhwaj, Anay Putty, Anirudh Ravishankar, Jaewoong Lee, Jinglin Xiao, Kyumin Andrew Shim, Mishika Ahuja, Nisarga Patil, Leo Liu, Zhuohan Liu, Weining Shen
arXiv:2608. 05030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge.
By Shaopeng Liang
arXiv:2608. 17625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 FIFA World Cup and already operates crowd management at Hajj scale.
By AlAnoud AllGhayth, AlJawharh AlOtaibi, Jude AlSubaie
arXiv:2607. 26061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-match tactical decision-making in professional football relies heavily on subjective expert analysis and identity-based scouting systems that cannot generalize to unseen teams.
By Mouad Zemzoumi, Amine Abouaomar
Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge. Dynamic Poisson-family models estimate team strength, expected goals, and coherent score probabilities, but do not directly understand roles, tactical matchups, motivation, or how a first goal changes behaviour.
arXiv:2608. 14982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers applied to spatial imperfect-information games must represent map geometry while tracking hidden entities through time.
By Wenji Fu
arXiv:2606. 09289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding tactical organisation of association football, hereafter referred to as football, requires identifying distinct match phases.
By Yuesen Li, Daniel Link
arXiv:2607. 18084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting a football match before kickoff requires more than knowing past results: a model must use changing information and make a clear prediction before the answer is available.
By Zhaokai Wang, Tianlin Gui, Jiayuan Rao, Shangzhe Di, Yihong Tang, Dingli Liang
arXiv:2607. 17765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce WC2026-Agents, a benchmark and dataset for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as autonomous forecasting agents on real, future events.
By Jiacheng Ding, Cong Guo, Jason Xu
arXiv:2607. 24573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support decisions about uncertain future events, yet evaluating their ability to forecast real-world outcomes remains difficult.
By Jonas Schr\"oder, Jonas Schweisthal, Oliver M\"uller, Markus Weinmann, Stefan Feuerriegel
arXiv:2608. 12926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional player evaluation in professional handball relies on basic box-score metrics or heuristic indices, which fail to credit the multi-player build-up chain.
By Julius Broermann, Oliver M\"uller, Michael D\"oring, Jochen Baumeister