Due to the non-played matches on the grounds of COVID-19 pandemics, the usual evaluation of the results of tournaments is biased. Matches won by default may cause unrealistic results. In this paper, an expedient method, the generalization of Thurstone method for more than two options, is applied. It is able to evaluate the results of the played matches without requiring equal matches’ numbers. This method takes the strength of the opposer into consideration as well. We apply the method for evaluating Handball Champions’ League’s results. We illustrate that it efficiently predicts the results in the future.

In this study, the effectiveness and characteristics of three ranking methods were investigated based on their performance in ranking European football teams. The investigated methods were the Thurstone method with ties, the analytic hierarchy process with logarithmic least squares method, and the RankNet neural network. The methods were analyzed in both complete and incomplete comparison tasks. The ranking based on complete comparison was performed on match results of national leagues, where each team had match results against all the other teams. In the incomplete comparison case, in addition to the national league results, only a few match results from international cups were available to determine the aggregated ranking of the teams playing in the top five European leagues. The rankings produced by the ranking methods were compared with each other, with the official national rankings, and with the UEFA club coefficient rankings. In addition, the correlation between the aggregated rankings and the Transfermarkt financial ranking was also examined for the sake of interest.

Ranking and rating methods have outstanding significance in sports, mainly due to their capacity to predict results. In this paper we turn to their capacity to aggregate separate groups’ rankings based on a small piece of information. We investigate under which conditions two or more separate groups can be trustworthily interwoven applying Thurstone motivated methods and an AHP based method. A theorem is proved which guarantees adequate unified ranking based on some links between the groups. We also analyse the robustness of the results.

In this paper, paired comparison models with stochastic background are investigated. We focus on the models that allow three options for choice and the parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood method. The existence and uniqueness of the estimator are key issues of the evaluation. In the case of two options, a necessary and sufficient condition is given by Ford in the Bradley–Terry model. We generalize this statement for the set of strictly log-concave distribution. Although in the case of three options the necessary and sufficient condition is not known, there are two different sufficient conditions that are formulated in the literature. In this paper, we generalize them; moreover, we compare these conditions. Their capacities to indicate the existence of the maximum were analyzed using a large number of computer simulations. These simulations support that the new condition indicates the existence of the maximum much more frequently than the previously known ones.