Ranking Methods for the Dutch Football Competition

Abstract

In the season 2019-2020, the Dutch Football competition was abrupted prematurely due to COVID-19. This season was not fully completed and therefore has some interesting properties for ranking methods, due to the fact that this is an uneven paired competition. I have used three different kind of ranking methods, based on the Perron-Frobenius theorem. The results show that the methods based on Keener's method produced rankings similar to the ranking assigned by the Dutch Football Association (KNVB). The method based on PageRank was very different than the original method.