ELASTIC: Event-Tracking Data Synchronization in Soccer Without Annotated Event Locations

TL;DR

ELASTIC is a novel synchronization framework for soccer data that uses tracking data features alone, accurately aligning event and tracking data without relying on potentially erroneous annotated event locations.

Contribution

ELASTIC introduces a tracking-data-only synchronization method that detects event end times and separates event types to improve accuracy and robustness.

Findings

ELASTIC outperforms existing methods significantly in synchronization accuracy.

Annotated 2,134 events for ground truth evaluation.

Demonstrated robustness across multiple soccer matches.

Abstract

The integration of event and tracking data has become essential for advanced analysis in soccer. However, synchronizing these two modalities remains a significant challenge due to temporal and spatial inaccuracies in manually recorded event timestamps. Existing synchronizers typically rely on annotated event locations, which themselves are prone to spatial errors and thus can distort synchronization results. To address this issue, we propose ELASTIC (Event-Location-AgnoSTIC synchronizer), a synchronization framework that only uses features derived from tracking data. ELASTIC also explicitly detects the end times of pass-like events and separates the detection of major and minor events, which improves the completeness of the synchronized output and reduces error cascade across events. We annotated the ground truth timestamps of 2,134 events from three Eredivisie matches to measure the synchronization accuracy, and the experimental results demonstrate that ELASTIC outperforms existing synchronizers by a large margin.