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.
arXiv:2607. 11548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatial football metrics such as pitch control assume access to the positions of all 22 players, yet the most widely available source of positional data -- the broadcast main camera -- shows only 10-16 of them at any moment.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 09289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding tactical organisation of association football, hereafter referred to as football, requires identifying distinct match phases.
arXiv:2608. 05030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge.
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.
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.
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. 17625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 FIFA World Cup and already operates crowd management at Hajj scale.
arXiv:2602. 12080v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite recent advances in AI, event data collection in soccer still relies heavily on labor-intensive manual annotation.
arXiv:2607. 25655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Among chess opening positions that a strong engine judges essentially equal (Stockfish 18 evaluation within 10 centipawns of zero, depth-stable) and that humans actually reach on Lichess (October 2025; 1,661 positions, 16.