Effect of Key Match Events on Football Passmaps

TL;DR

This paper models football teams as directed networks to analyze how key match events influence team dynamics, using network analysis techniques to gain insights and contribute extensive new data to the field.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach applying network analysis to football match events and provides over 9000 new football network representations for research use.

Findings

Match events significantly alter network centrality measures.

Community structures in the network change following key events.

The approach offers new insights into match flow dynamics.

Abstract

A team of association football players may be envisioned as a directed network with player nodes and weighted pass edges. Such a simplistic representation of an otherwise complex structure yields several benefits, but also permits the application of well-established network analysis approaches, to gain insights into the match flow. The authors of this work propose the application of these, including centrality measures, community detection methods, and the analysis of induced subgraphs, to analyze the potential effects certain match events have on the team. In addition to reporting on their findings, they emphasize their work's contribution of over 9000 novel football network representations to the Network Analysis community.