PageRank Algorithm Reveals World’s All-Time Top Soccer Team
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/535861/pagerank-algorithm-reveals-worlds-all-time-top-soccer-team/
This article talks about how Verica Lazova and Lasko Basnarkov at Cyril and Methodius University in Macedonia used Google’s famous PageRank algorithm to rank all the world’s national football teams using the results of 20 World Cup tournaments since 1930. They accomplished this by compiling the results of over 7000 games played between 210 countries in the 20 World Cup tournaments, and created a network where each node is a team and a link connects teams that have played against each other. The weight and polarity of each link was calculated based on the results of the games, such as how badly one team beat the other and how many times they have beaten them. Their results showed that the top ranked team is Brazil, which is not very surprising given they have won the World Cup five times.
In class we learned about how PageRank is an algorithm designed by Google founders as a method of ranking website pages by their importance for web searching. It ranks it based on counting the number and weighting of the links to a node, and in general, the more links a directed to a node, the more important the node is. In this case, Brazil is no surprise to be the highest ranked because it has won the most tournaments, won the most games, and scored the most goals in the network. Within each “update” to the PageRank values, Brazil and other top teams such as Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and others gets more shares of values than other teams. This is an interesting application of the PageRank algorithm that can be utilized for any other sport or competition.