Bringing Analytics to the Soccer Transfer Season

SAS posted an article that shares how they applied analytics to optimize players movements between clubs during the soccer transfer season. Every team needs to answer the ultimate question: “How should we allocate our transfer budget to maximize the benefit we gain?” Maximizing benefit under a limited resource is known as the Knapsack problem in combinatorial optimization. Given a set of items and their values, the Knapsack problem is to find the optimal selection of items to pack within a weight limit to maximize the total value. This article deals with a similar problem: given a set of players, their values and ratings, how to choose which players to transfer to maximize total team rating within a budget limit. Link