Soccer Goalkeeper Performance Evaluation: Clustering Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a clustering-based evaluation method for soccer goalkeepers that considers both saved penalties and their ability to detect kick directions, providing a more comprehensive performance assessment.

Contribution

The work proposes four new measures for goalkeeper performance evaluation, including one that accounts for directional detection, which was overlooked by existing metrics.

Findings

Proposed measures effectively evaluate goalkeeper performance.

Measures align with actual goalkeeper performance in real matches.

Inclusion of directional detection improves assessment accuracy.

Abstract

The objective of this work was to help the soccer field managers to evaluate the performance of a goalkeeper in saving the penalty kicks. To this end, based on the concept of clustering, four measures were proposed for evaluating the goalkeeper's performance in terms of both the saved kicks and detecting the direction of kicked ball. The well-known measures ignore the goalkeeper's ability in detecting the directional jump, while the forth proposed measure in this work was regarded this fact. The effectiveness of the proposed measures were analyzed and demonstrated by evaluating the performance of goalkeepers participated in four important soccer matches. The results were consistent with the proposed measures. In summary, as well as the known point statistics for evaluating the performance of goalkeeper, the measures were proposed in this work that regard as well the ability of goalkeeper in detecting the direction of kicks are also suggested.