RSS prediction competition 2025

Author

Ben Powell

This page introduces and describes 2025’s sports prediction competition, organized by the Statistics in Sports Section of the Royal Statistical Society. This year we will be returning to Wimbledon but employing a novel scoring system. Entrants to the prediction competition are asked to become sports agents and to invest (fictional) tokens in shares of tennis players. The prize money won by a tennis player will be split between investors in proportion to the number of shares held.

For example if investors A, B and C invest 2, 3 and 5 tokens, respectively, in Carlos Alcaraz and he wins Wimbledon, his £2.7m prize money will be split so that A receives \[ \frac{2}{2+3+5} \times £ 2700000 = £540000. \]

This means that an investor’s profits depend on the success of players they invest in and the investment choices of other investors. We expect the amounts of Wimbledon prize money not to differ significantly from their values in 2024, which are available here.

Our prediction competition has three categories

The winners of the categories will be invited to present their forecast methodology at the RSS annual conference. Conference fees, travel and accommodation fees are generously provided by sponsors Amelco.

1 Further details on submissions

  • You have 10 investment tokens to allocate in total.
  • Fractions of a token, not just integer amounts, can be allocated.
  • We are restricting the competition to account only for prize money in the female and male singles competitions.
  • Submissions will take the form of an .xlsx (Excel) file with two columns, the first containing player names and the second containing a non-negative number of tokens. We will use some fuzzy text-matching on the names, which ought to catch obvious typos but please take care with spelling.
  • Please submit your entries via the google form here (where you will be invited to outline your methodology if you would like to be considered for this prize).
  • The deadline for submissions will be 23.59 Sunday 29 June 2025.

2 Data

You are free to use any publicly available data set to inform your investment decisions. For example, the ATP and WTA websites have user-friendly pages for reading up on the top players. For keen model-builders, there also exist open-access data sets to train on, such as this one provided by Jeff Sackmann. Jeff also maintains a very interesting tennis blog that you may find useful.