Modeling the Beautiful Game: Duke Students Win Global Math Competition with Soccer Analytics

As the 2026 World Cup puts soccer in the global spotlight, three Duke sophomores tackled a different challenge behind the game: How to build a team that can compete, stay profitable and avoid the financial disaster of relegation.  

The answer — developed by Mathematics majors Daniel Cheng, Malachy O’Donnabhain and Zain Radwan — earned top honors in one of the world’s largest and most competitive undergraduate mathematics contests. 

Competing against 32,000 teams from 28 countries in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), organized by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP), the trio earned the Outstanding Winner designation — the competition’s highest honor — and swept three additional award categories for creativity and technical excellence.  

But while their winning model focused on professional soccer, the partnership that powered the project began with a different sport entirely: rugby.  

“We actually all met playing rugby freshman year,” said Radwan, a double-major in Math and Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Daniel and I even discovered we went to rival high schools in the UK and had played against each other before Duke. Our math partnership really grew out of our friendship.” 

When the Math department circulated an email inviting students to participate in the modeling competition, Cheng suggested the idea to Radwan, and the pair quickly recruited O’Donnabhain, their close friend and Duke Rugy Football Club teammate. The contest requires teams of up to three students to analyze an open‑ended real‑world problem and produce a full mathematical modeling paper within 96 hours. 

Unlike traditional math competitions, the problems resemble complex research challenges. Teams must formulate assumptions, design models, gather data and present conclusions — all under severe time pressure. 

The group chose Problem D, which asked competitors to build an operational model for managing a professional sports franchise.  

“It was exactly the type of problem that fit our interests,” Cheng said, a double major in Math and Economics. “It involved operations research, economics and statistical modeling all at once.” 

They decided to select Cheng’s favorite club team, English Premier League’s Crystal Palace F.C., for the math problem and combine performance analytics with financial decision‑making. 

Their first step was building a shared blueprint for the system they wanted to model. 

“We spent a lot of time upfront just breaking the problem down,” said O’Donnabhain, a Math and Philosophy double major. “It was huge and messy. Once we agreed on the overall structure, we could divide the work and tackle different components without losing the big picture.” 

Working side‑by‑side in an empty classroom in the Physics Building over a snowy February weekend, the three friends sketched the architecture of their model across whiteboards, splitting responsibilities based on strengths and interests. Radwan focused on player evaluation and injury risk, Cheng built economic models for ticket pricing and revenue optimization, and O’Donnabhain helped integrate the statistical framework tying everything together. 

One of the group’s most distinctive contributions was creating a metric they named PP90 — “performance per 90 minutes” — designed to quantify how much value a soccer player contributes during a full match. 

“In soccer, players have completely different roles depending on their position,” Radwan explained. “You can’t compare a goalkeeper and a striker using the same statistics. We created separate models for each position and standardized them so they could still be compared.” 

The model combined performance statistics, expected playing time and injury risk to estimate how each player influenced a team’s probability of success. A key factor was the enormous financial consequence of relegation from the Premier League. 

“The downside risk of relegation is massive — around a $100 million loss when you factor in TV rights and revenue,” Radwan explained. “Our model evaluated players partly based on how much they reduced that risk.” 

Because detailed professional sports data is often proprietary, the students had to find creative ways to work with limited publicly available statistics.  

“A lot of teams guard their data closely,” Cheng said. “We had to design metrics that could still work with the data we could access. That forced us to be creative in how we built our models.” 

One particularly novel idea drew inspiration from another sport entirely. The team adapted concepts similar to baseball’s well‑known Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic to measure player value in soccer. 

“Baseball is incredibly data‑driven, and we realized some of those ideas could translate,” O’Donnabhain said. “We tried to capture the difference a player makes compared to a typical replacement-level player.” 

Despite the mathematical intensity, the weekend wasn’t all equations. The group maintained a daily routine — meeting up around 10 a.m., working through the day and taking breaks to eat together. When a winter storm rolled through Durham, they pressed pause on their calculations to step outside and play in the snow. 

“These guys are some of my closest friends,” O’Donnabhain said. “I was going to spend the weekend with them anyway. Doing math together just made it even more fun.” 

After submitting their final paper late Monday night, the team felt proud of their work but had no expectation of the outcome. 

“There are so many brilliant teams in this competition,” Radwan said. “We knew we’d done something good, but you never assume you’re going to win.” 

Months later, the results arrived in dramatic fashion. O’Donnabhain was midway through a 19‑hour flight to Singapore when he woke up and checked the competition website. 

“I saw our problem listed as an Outstanding Winner but couldn’t remember our team number,” he said. “Then my phone reconnected to Wi‑Fi and all these messages from Daniel came through saying, ‘We won. We won!’” 

Their paper, which developed a complex model for managing a professional soccer club, is slated for publication later this year in the Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications Journal and earned the team a $9,000 prize. 

Beyond the awards, the students say the experience reinforced a simple lesson about college life. 

“There are so many opportunities here,” O’Donnabhain said. “If you just try things and put yourself out there, you never know what might happen.” 

For Radwan, the weekend’s success was also a reminder that mathematical breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation. 

“A lot of the credit goes to our teamwork,” he said. “Because we trust each other and know how we think, we could push ideas further. The math worked because the collaboration worked.”