  We propose two Bayesian multinomial-Dirichlet models to predict the final
outcome of football (soccer) matches and compare them to three well-known
models regarding their predictive power. All the models predicted the full-time
results of 1710 matches of the first division of the Brazilian football
championship and the comparison used three proper scoring rules, the proportion
of errors and a calibration assessment. We also provide a goodness of fit
measure. Our results show that multinomial-Dirichlet models are not only
competitive with standard approaches, but they are also well calibrated and
present reasonable goodness of fit.
