  The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the
full-stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football
leagues were suddenly stopped and each country was hesitating between a
relaunch of the competition and a premature ending. Some opted for the latter
option, and took as the final standing of the season the ranking from the
moment the competition got interrupted. This decision has been perceived as
unfair, especially by those teams who had remaining matches against easier
opponents. In this paper, we introduce a tool to calculate in a fairer way the
final standings of domestic leagues that have to stop prematurely: our
Probabilistic Final Standing Calculator (PFSC). It is based on a stochastic
model taking into account the results of the matches played and simulating the
remaining matches, yielding the probabilities for the various possible final
rankings. We have compared our PFSC with state-of-the-art prediction models,
using previous seasons which we pretend to stop at different points in time. We
illustrate our PFSC by showing how a probabilistic ranking of the French Ligue
1 in the stopped 2019-2020 season could have led to alternative, potentially
fairer, decisions on the final standing.
