The importance of a match in a tournament

A quantitative measure of “match importance” is useful in a number of decision problems, for example: as a metric in tournament design; for selecting matches for broadcasting; for scheduling matches in a tournament; and for assigning referees. To date measures of match importance used in such analyses have been relatively naïve. We discuss a general measure that considers the effect of a particular match on the end of tournament position, given the results of all other matches, some played, some predicted. We use logistic regression to predict matches and Monte Carlo simulation to compute the match importance measure, and apply these to soccer matches in the English Football Association Premier League.