Stochastic model for football's collective dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic model based on linear interactions to analyze and understand the collective dynamics of football players, providing insights into team coordination and performance evaluation.

Contribution

It presents a novel stochastic model for football player motion that captures team dynamics and offers a new analytical tool for performance assessment.

Findings

The model accurately reproduces observed spatiotemporal patterns.

It reveals underlying cooperative mechanisms in football plays.

Provides a framework for performance evaluation.

Abstract

In this paper, we study collective interaction dynamics emerging in the game of football-soccer. To do so, we surveyed a database containing body-sensors traces measured during three professional football matches, where we observed statistical patterns that we used to propose a stochastic model for the players' motion in the field. The model, which is based on linear interactions, captures in good approximation the spatiotemporal dynamics of a football team. Our theoretical framework, therefore, becomes an effective analytical tool to uncover the underlying cooperative mechanisms behind the complexity of football plays. Moreover, we showed that it can provide handy theoretical support for coaches to evaluate teams' and players' performances in both training sessions and competitive scenarios.