Related papers: QPass: a Merit-based Evaluation of Soccer Passes
A quest for uncovering influence of behaviour on team performance involves understanding individual behaviour, interactions with others and environment, variations across groups, and effects of interventions. Although insights into each of…
The expected possession value (EPV) of a soccer possession represents the likelihood of a team scoring or receiving the next goal at any time instance. By decomposing the EPV into a series of subcomponents that are estimated separately, we…
In this paper, we examine how soccer players can use their spatial relationships to control parts of the field and safely move play up the field via chains of ``safe configurations,'' i.e. configurations of players on a team ensuring the…
This paper presents a novel framework for evaluating players in association football (soccer). Our method uses possession sequences, i.e. sequences of consecutive on-ball actions, for deriving estimates for player strengths. On the surface,…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
Penalties are fraught and game-changing moments in soccer games that teams explicitly prepare for. Consequently, there has been substantial interest in analyzing them in order to provide advice to practitioners. From a data science…
We consider the task of determining the number of chances a soccer team creates, along with the composite nature of each chance-the players involved and the locations on the pitch of the assist and the chance. We propose an interpretable…
In soccer, contextual player performance metrics are invaluable to coaches. For example, the ability to perform under pressure during matches distinguishes the elite from the average. Appropriate pressure metric enables teams to assess…
Soccer attracts the attention of many researchers and professionals in the sports industry. Therefore, the incorporation of science into the sport is constantly growing, with increasing investments in performance analysis and sports…
Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate reinforcements,…
Tackling is a fundamental defensive move in American football, with the main purpose of stopping the forward motion of the ball-carrier. However, current tackling metrics are manually recorded outcomes that are inherently flawed due to…
The objective of this study was to incorporate contextual information into the modelling of player movements. This was achieved by combining the distributions of forthcoming passing contests that players committed to and those they did not.…
Pressing is a fundamental defensive strategy in football, characterized by applying pressure on the ball owning team to regain possession. Despite its significance, existing metrics for measuring pressing often lack precision or…
As artificial intelligence spreads out to numerous fields, the application of AI to sports analytics is also in the spotlight. However, one of the major challenges is the difficulty of automated acquisition of continuous movement data…
In soccer (or association football), players quickly go from heroes to zeroes, or vice-versa. Performance is not a static measure but a somewhat volatile one. Analyzing performance as a time series rather than a stationary point in time is…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
Intuitively, experience playing against one mixture of opponents in a given domain should be relevant for a different mixture in the same domain. We propose a transfer learning method, Q-Mixing, that starts by learning Q-values against each…
In this paper, we study interaction dynamics in the game of football-soccer in the context of ball possession intervals. To do so, we analyze a database comprising one season of the five major football leagues of Europe. Using this input,…
In this study, the stochastic properties of player and team ball possession times in professional football matches are examined. Data analysis shows that player possession time follows a gamma distribution and the player count of a team…
A knowledgeable observer of a game of football (soccer) can make a subjective evaluation of the quality of passes made between players during the game. We investigate the problem of producing an automated system to make the same evaluation…