Striving for equal competitions: eQuality Index makes first appearance in 2019/20 season
The KNVB (Dutch Football Federation) recently entered into a partnership with SciSports to make the amateur football competitions even better, more equal and more exciting.
In the coming seasons, the KNVB and SciSports will be working together on the development of a tool to ensure that teams can be classified even better based on their team strength, the so-called ‘Team Index’.
Currently there is no objective measure to determine the strength of the amateur teams. Therefore team strength is not taken into account in the classification process of competitions, resulting in big differences in strengths of teams within competitions. The Team Index is intended to provide more equal and exciting competitions that will ultimately provide more football fun for all players.
How to determine a Team Index
The Team Index is used to determine the playing strength of a team. This ‘team strength’ is a new factor that will be used to create competitions with teams of similar strength. The determination of the team strength is done by means of four steps:
- Based on (historical) match data from the KNVB, the relative strength of all amateur players is determined.
- When it is known in which team players will play, it is possible to determine an average team strength (Team Index).
- The team strength is added to the current classification process together with the existing classification factors such as travel distance and club preferences.
- Teams are, also on the basis of their ‘team strength’, classified so that there are more equal matches and competitions.
Pilot competitions
The KNVB will start to classify a number of pilot competitions based on the Team Index, starting next season (2019/20). The first pilot will be played with the competitions of the Under 15 and Under 19 starting this autumn.
Johan Vuegen, Head of Projects at SciSports: “Over the last months colleagues of the KNVB and SciSports worked closely together to develop the Team Index. The expertise of the KNVB on the Dutch amateur football was combined with the football data intelligence brought in by SciSports. Right now we can say that we are progressing towards a first version of the Team Index for more than 60,000 amateur teams. In the next months we will further optimize the Team Index so that it can be used to set up equal competitions.”
