Hi Sam!
First and foremost I should admit that none of our group had ever used Mathematica prior to undertaking this project, so were very much learning as we went along. At the outset we did look at those two machine learning based models, but had difficulty deciphering all of what was going on.
And since we wanted to look at club teams rather than international teams, there was much less data to work with. Most significantly we were unable to obtain data on individual players, so building a classifier may have been difficult.
The general model we used is called time-independent Poisson regression (see here) and although perhaps not the optimum model for this task does obviously perform reasonably well.
