AUEB Sports Analytics Group
Team Leaders
Dimitris Karlis is a professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics of Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). Prof. Karlis has a numerous research articles in methodological and computational journals of Statistics. Over the last years he is more and more involved in projects related with Biostatistics and Big data He is actively developed high quality applied research in modelling Sports data with emphasis in football and betting.
Ioannis Ntzoufras is a Professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistics at Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). He is working in the area of Bayesian modelling and computation with emphasis in variable selection. He has published a worldwide best seller book on Bayesian modelling. In parallel with his main research activities he has worked on modelling football data, measures of competitive balance in sports leagues and performance analysis in Volleyball.
Group Members
Leonardo Egidi, postdoctoral researcher, Department of Business, Economics, Mathematics and Statistics (DEAMS), University of Trieste (Italy). Leonardo he got his PhD in Statistics at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova. His research mainly focuses on both theoretical and applied Bayesian statistics, with a particular attention to models for sports data, such as football and volleyball. He also provides statistical consultancy to small firms, hospitals and medical departments. He is an active member of the team from 2018.
Sotiris Drikos is currently serving as an assistant professor in Volleyball performance analysis at the Department of Physical Education and Sport Science of the University of Athens. He previously served as the manager of the Greek national Volleyball team (among other top teams including Olympiakos), He is currently working on building models for performance analysis in Volleyball. He is a member of the team since 2015.
Vasilios Manasis is a Teaching Assistant and researcher at the Department of Physical Education and Sport Science of the University of Athens. Dr Manasis is an expert on measuring competitive balance in Sports and he has extensively studied the Economic effect of competitiveness in European football leagues. He is a member of the team since 2015.
Vasilis Armatas is a football match analyst, currently working at Olympiacos FC Academy as Lead Match Analyst. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the S.P.E.S.S. - Thessaloniki and a Ph.D. degree from the S.P.E.S.S. - Athens. He has worked as a match analyst and scout at SuperLeague teams since 2010, amongst others at Panathinaikos and AEK, participating at UEFA Europa League and UEFA Champions League and has co-authored the book "Set plays in soccer". His current research interest focuses on analyzing tactical performance, profiling performance, performance indicators and home advantage effect in football.
Christos Marmarinos holds a Ph.D. in Basketball Analysis by University of Athens. He worked as an assistant coach in Olympiacos Basketball team for 14 years (2004-18). He has been involved in numerous high-level basketball projects. Currently he is serving as a consultant for the Sacramento Kings.
Argyro Damoulaki is a PhD student at the Department of Statistics AUEB. She has a background in Applied Mathematics from NTUA and a master's degree in Statistics from AUEB. Her current research focuses on Bayesian performance evaluation models that integrate her passion for basketball and mathematics/statistics.
Georgios Giasemidis is a lead data scientist at Choreograph and a basketball analytics enthusiast and practitioner. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford and brings over a decade of experience in data science, machine learning, and AI, applied across diverse industries and projects. Georgios combines his expertise in statistics and numerical analysis with his passion for basketball, and he is the author and maintainer of the 'euroleague-api' Python library."
External Collaborators
Ilias Leriou is a PhD student at the Department of Statistics AUEB. He is currently working on Bayesian Survival Models with applications in Football arrival times.
Vasilis Palaskas is an M.Sc. Graduate from the Department of Statistics AUEB. He is currently working at OpenBet and he is collaborating with AUEB Sports Analytics on Bayesian Analysis of Volleyball Data.
Angelos Alexopoulos is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK). His main research interests lie in the areas of computational statistics and statistical modelling of biological, economic and sport data. He obtained his PhD in statistics from Athens University of Economics and Business and has worked at the past as post-doctoral research at University College London (UCL). He has worked with the AUEB sports analytics group on the analysis of Tennis data and on the career prediction of the Greek well known player Tsitsipas.
Konstantinos Pelechrinis is an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his diploma from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, while he holds a PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science of the University of California, at Riverside. His research interests include applied data science and machine learning, with an emphasis on applications in urban science and sports. He has consulted for professional sports teams, while he has also received the prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office for his research on multidimensional networks.
Nial Friel is a Professor at University College Dublin. He has performed cutting edge research in the areas of Bayesian Statistics, computation, networks. He is currently working with Dimitris Karlis and Ioannis Ntzoufras in developing new dynamic models for predicting football outcomes.
Ioannis Kosmidis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Science, at University College London. His theoretical and methodological research focuses on penalized likelihood methods for optimal estimation and inference of statistical models, and clustering methods. He is working on a range of applications in sports, including investigations on the statistical and structural interdependence between health, fitness, fatigue and performance, and the modelling of game dynamics in team sports. He is also the leader of the Statistics in Sports and Health research group at UCL.
Panagiotis Meletakos is an expert in Handball as a coach of Greek A1 teams for several years. He is holding a PhD from the School of Physical Education and Sports Science of the University of Athens. In his Scientific interests are included performance analysis in Invasion games and competitive balance in national leagues.
Gianluca Baio, Reader in Statistics & Health Economics, Department of Statistical Science, University College London. Gianluca graduated in Statistics and Economics from the University of Florence (Italy). He then completed a PhD programme in Applied Statistics again at the University of Florence, after a period at the Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge (USA); he then worked as a Research Fellow and then Temporary Lecturer in the Department of Statistical Sciences at University College London (UK). Gianluca's main interests are in Bayesian statistical modelling, with applications in economic evaluation and decision modelling (eg cost effectiveness analysis and decision-making problems in the health systems), hierarchical/multilevel models and causal inference using the decision-theoretic approach. Gianluca leads the Statistics for Health Economic Evaluation research group within the department of Statistical Science.
Stefan Kesenne was the inspiration for the founding of the research team. e visited AUEB in 2015 to teach a short course, which led to the formation of the workshop. He was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Antwerp and the University of Leuven. His research laid the foundation of the modern theory of Sport Economics. He wrote the book "The Economic Theory of Professional Team Sports". Professor Kesenne served as the academic advisor of the group on topics of Economic theory and competitive balance issues. He was actively involved in the Bossman case which changed European football. He passed away in 2022. The team will always be grateful for his inspiring contributions.