Fitting a Poisson Regression Model on the Iranian Premier League Football Results

Today, the predictive results of sporting events have become an important issue. Meanwhile, soccer is of particular importance in Iran and the need for a model that, not only can predict the result of a game, but also can predict the result of an entire league, is felt. Therefore, this paper attempts to present a statistical model for responding to this need by using Bayesian methods. Here, Poisson regression model is first introduced and then is used to obtain estimates of model parameters, using WinBUGS software. Finally, the model is used to fit on the data of the Iranian Premier League during the year 1388-89.