Modelling touch football (touch rugby) as a Markov process

Touch football is a high profile sport within Australasia, with the potential for large international growth, but a relative absence of research into the sport. The game of touch football was modelled using a series of modified Markov states. The aim of this model was to provide a framework allowing expansion to account for additional game states, time dependence and displacement dependence. The representation was designed to allow adaptation by application of alternative displacement and time dimensional distributions, displacement and time dimensional distribution parameters, and state change probabilities. This would allow adaption to the model according to other various styles of team play and associated levels and composition of teams. Due to the state based nature of the Markov processes involved, the model was planned for more intensive examination in following research focusing on more closely analysing each state in turn. The goal of this paper, however, was to produce the foundation model framework to allow for future development in modelling the sport of touch football.