Alcune annotazioni sul gioco del totocalcio

Abstract

In this paper we look for statistical regularities in football pools, a game in which many variables, not all of them random, play an important role. Studing the results of the football matches of the decade 1980-90 we succeed in fitting a multinomial model to the distribution of winning compositions and this may be read as an indicator of a sort of independence in the results of football pools which expresses itself in the invariance of the probabilities of the results 1, x, 2. This, however, does not mean that every team has the same probability of winning, losing or drawing; in fact the composition that more frequently wins is not the one realized by the highest number of permutations. A further proof of the presence of not-random components in the game of football pools is given by the low correlation between the empirical frequencies of wins and the probability of the winning columns.