Historic Data Questions & Model Development

[twoplustwo]

Hi guys, new user here. A little background: I spent 5 years working in demand forecasting for a large power company and now work in energy trading. I'm reasonably comfortable with stats, programming and risk/expected value etc. I also used to play poker to a reasonable standard until the games got much tougher and I left uni and started commuting to work :) I am looking to develop a model mostly out of curiosity to calculate the odds UK football matches. I have a couple of questions as I start to plan my approach (currently focussing on a basic combination of home/away team expectations and refining): - How are promotions/relegations treated with historic data? Assuming I have data from the last 5 years. - On a similar note, do we run into issues of sample size at the start of a new season? - I have read much about poisson/zero interest poisson online. ZIP seems to provide a better fit but even then there are proponents of regular poisson.

[twoplustwo]

Re: Historic Data Questions & Model Development Also, re adding a variable to account for home advantage: I would expect this to be adequately captured in home results, no? Assuming that I am looking to compare home team stats to away team stats. Cheers.