Statistics of football dynamics

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the statistical properties of football match dynamics, revealing power-law distributions in ball touches and proposing a model to explain these complex behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical analysis of football dynamics across multiple championships and proposes a model to explain the observed power-law behavior.

Findings

Ball touches follow power-law distributions with q-gamma fits.

Out-of-play intervals exhibit distinct statistical properties.

Model provides insights into the complex dynamics of football matches.

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of football matches. Our goal is to characterize statistically the temporal sequence of ball movements in this collective sport game, searching for traits of complex behavior. Data were collected over a variety of matches in South American, European and World championships throughout 2005 and 2006. We show that the statistics of ball touches presents power-law tails and can be described by $q$-gamma distributions. To explain such behavior we propose a model that provides information on the characteristics of football dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss the statistics of duration of out-of-play intervals, not directly related to the previous scenario.