Controlling ball progression in soccer
Catherine Pfaff, Emily Hunter, Haozhi Hong, Daniel Forestell, Ari, Fialkov, Zoey Drassinower, Timothy Chan

TL;DR
This paper models soccer ball progression using a graph-based framework of player configurations to analyze safe passing options and strategic movement, aiming to enhance team tactics and decision-making.
Contribution
It introduces a novel graph-based model of player configurations and safe passing chains to analyze and improve ball progression strategies in soccer.
Findings
Configurations with multiple passing options increase attack robustness
The graph model identifies configurations prone to turnovers
Framework supports strategy development and decision-making
Abstract
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 possessor of the ball has a collection of open passing options all connected by open passing lanes. An underlying philosophy behind our work is that it is most difficult to disrupt an attacking team's progression forward (with the ball) when this attacking team has multiple ``good'' options of how to proceed at each moment in time. We provide some evidence of this. Our main construction is a directed weighted graph where the nodes encode the configurations of players, the directed edges encode transformations between these configurations, and the weights encode the relative frequencies of the transformations. We conclude with a few applications and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSports Analytics and Performance · Sports Performance and Training
