An elaborate approach to game winning strategies and player ratings in football

In an industry where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing apart to a ridiculous extent, outsmarting the big spender has never been more crucial. Making more informed decisions regarding the buying of football players is becoming more and more important. Therefore, player rating tools can be useful for football teams to support these decisions. In this master thesis we design a new method for rating football players. We call this the Exact Player Rating (EPR). This method will not only estimate a player's skill level, but will also incorporate the most important game winning aspects of football and link this to the players at hand. We have shown that the EPR method does not only show better results in terms of predictive power, but also provides more useful information and does not overvalue offensive skills, which most current player rating methods do.