In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work analyzes teams throughout the entire English Football League system. We modeled team performance using weighted Colley and Massey ranking methods which incorporate player valuations from the widely-used website Transfermarkt to predict game outcomes. Our initial analysis found that lower leagues are more difficult to forecast in general. Yet, after removing dominant outlier teams from the analysis, we found that top leagues were just as difficult to predict as lower leagues. We also extended our findings using data from multiple German and Scottish leagues. Finally, we discuss reasons to doubt attributing Transfermarkt's predictive value to wisdom of the crowd.

翻译：本研究探讨了不同数学模型在准确预测英格兰足球金字塔各级别赛事中的能力。现有研究主要集中于欧洲顶级联赛，而我们的工作则分析了整个英格兰足球联赛系统中的球队表现。我们采用加权的Colley和Massey排名方法建立球队表现模型，该方法整合了广受欢迎的Transfermarkt网站提供的球员估值数据以预测比赛结果。初步分析发现，低级别联赛的预测难度普遍更高。然而，在剔除主导性异常球队后，我们发现顶级联赛的预测难度与低级别联赛相当。我们进一步利用德国和苏格兰多个联赛的数据验证了研究结论。最后，我们对将Transfermarkt的预测价值归因于"群体智慧"的观点提出了质疑理由。