If you want to use the alt-3.uk league tables elsewhere, please be sure to read the License and Disclaimer page first.

Acknowledgements

Funding

Most of alt-3 is the work of many evenings and weekends, not really funded by anyone!

But the project grew tangentially out of two other, more substantial programmes of work, carried out at the University of Warwick some years ago. Two different UK research-funding bodies must be acknowledged for their support through research grants:

  • The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded ‘Generalized Nonlinear Models: Theory, Computation and Extensions’ (2009–2012). Among the outputs of that project was the BradleyTerry2 package for R — work on which led us to develop the alt-3 method.

  • The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded ‘Models, Measurement and Inference in Social Research’ (2003–2006). The gnm package for R, which is used extensively in alt-3, was one of the main outputs of that project.

The sustained and ongoing academic support of the University of Warwick itself, through its excellent research facilities, is also gratefully acknowledged.

Data sources

There are two sources of football results data used in alt-3. They are:

The creators and maintainers of those data sources deserve great kudos for the wonderful work they have done to make such data freely available to all.

Open-source statistical software

All of the data wrangling and statistical analysis for alt-3 is done in the open-source R software. The creators and maintainers of R, and of the various contributed R packages that are used in the alt-3 code, are due enormous thanks for their generous work in creating a brilliant environment for statistical computing and publication.

Internet hosting and other open-source software

The alt-3 website is hosted on Github, and is built using Jekyll with a variant of the Minimal Mistakes theme. The developers of all of these deserve great thanks for their generous work.

Attribution of image rights

The picture of a football that is used in the alt-3.uk logo is derived from an original image that has been kindly shared through Wikimedia Commons. See
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soccer_ball.svg
for the original image and other details.

The ‘alt-tree’ image that appeared in this blog post is derived from a drawing of a Christmas Tree that has been kindly shared through Wikimedia Commons. See
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christmas_tree.svg for the original image and other details, including license.

Some individual acknowledgements

The details of the alt-3 method and its implementation have been informed by some excellent Masters-level projects undertaken by students at the University of Warwick, notably the project dissertations of Seulki Chung (2016) and Jonathan Kent (2017).

Thanks go also to Fred Firth, for critical reading of the early draft content of this website — and especially to the rest of his family, for their patience and understanding while ‘the geek’ (Fred’s dad) was busy playing with all this!