Modeling the Trend of Performance of the Manchester United Football Club in the 1960-2013 English Premiership

Abstract

This research studied the trend of performance of Manchester United Football Club in the 1960-2013 English premiership seasons. The three main variables involved in this study are the number of games won, games drawn and games lost by Manchester United for the study period. But this study concentrated on the number of games lost since the objective of every manager of a team is to minimize loss and maximize win or draw. Thus the objective of this study is to develop a model for predicting the number of games that would be lost by Manchester United in future seasons using games played in the previous seasons. The data used for this study are secondary data obtained from sportamok and English premiership websites. The statistical technique used for this study is time series analysis. Specifically, Autore­gressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model was used to develop a model for the number of games lost by Manchester United. The model was used to forecast for the next fifteen seasons. The model predicted that Manchester United will lose six (6) games for 2013/2014 season.

Keywords: Manchster United Football Club, English Premiership, Time Series Analysis, ARIMA