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About Ian
Professor Ian McHale is Professor of Sports Analytics in the Strategy, International Business and Entrepreneurship group at the University of Liverpool School of Management, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. His research specializations include statistics in sport, analysis of gambling markets and issues relating to gambling, ranking methods in sport, forecasting results in football, tennis, cricket and golf, assessment of changes to gambling regulation, and behaviour of lottery players. He holds editorial positions as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Forecasting and the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sport. McHale was the founding Chair of the Royal Statistical Society's Statistics in Sport Section. He created the EA SPORTS Player Performance Indicator in 2005, the official player ratings system of the Barclays Premier League, and designed and implemented the Sports Analytics Machine (SAM), which produces forecasts for every Premier League and Championship match for BBC Sport.
Professor McHale's research has had significant impact on sport integrity and gambling policy. In collaboration with Professor David Forrest, he developed tools to rate individual football players, estimate their importance to teams, and create probabilistic forecasting models for match outcomes to monitor betting markets for corruption. Their work informed global anti-match-fixing strategies, including reports for the European Commission, evaluations of Fraud Detection Systems for UEFA, evidence in Court of Arbitration for Sport proceedings, and education for nearly 15,000 elite athletes across ten sports. Key publications include 'Gambling and wellbeing: Uneven gains and deficits across risk levels' (2026, Social Science & Medicine, with D. Forrest, K. Narita, A. Orujov), 'Forecasting football match results using a player rating based model' (2024, International Journal of Forecasting, with B. Holmes), 'A flexible mixed model for age-dependent performance: application to golf' (2023, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics, with R. D. Baker), 'A Bradley-Terry type model for forecasting tennis match results' (2011, International Journal of Forecasting), and 'Plus–minus player ratings for soccer' (2020). He has consulted for football clubs, the Premier League, the Press Association, GambleAware, the General Medical Council, and bookmakers, and provides courses on statistics, analytics in sport, and forecasting.