EventGPT: Capturing Player Impact from Team Action Sequences Using GPT-Based Framework

TL;DR

EventGPT is a novel GPT-based model that predicts football match events and player impact, enabling counterfactual transfer analysis and outperforming existing methods in accuracy and spatial precision.

Contribution

We introduce EventGPT, a transformer-based framework that models match sequences and player impact, allowing for counterfactual simulations and transfer evaluation in football.

Findings

Outperforms existing baselines in next-event prediction accuracy

Achieves higher spatial precision in event prediction

Enables practical transfer analysis through counterfactual simulations

Abstract

Transfers play a pivotal role in shaping a football club's success, yet forecasting whether a transfer will succeed remains difficult due to the strong context-dependence of on-field performance. Existing evaluation practices often rely on static summary statistics or post-hoc value models, which fail to capture how a player's contribution adapts to a new tactical environment or different teammates. To address this gap, we introduce EventGPT, a player-conditioned, value-aware next-event prediction model built on a GPT-style autoregressive transformer. Our model treats match play as a sequence of discrete tokens, jointly learning to predict the next on-ball action's type, location, timing, and its estimated residual On-Ball Value (rOBV) based on the preceding context and player identity. A key contribution of this framework is the ability to perform counterfactual simulations. By substituting learned player embeddings into new event sequences, we can simulate how a player's behavioral distribution and value profile would change when placed in a different team or tactical structure. Evaluated on five seasons of Premier League event data, EventGPT outperforms existing sequence-based baselines in next-event prediction accuracy and spatial precision. Furthermore, we demonstrate the model's practical utility for transfer analysis through case studies-such as comparing striker performance across different systems and identifying stylistic replacements for specific roles-showing that our approach provides a principled method for evaluating transfer fit.