FC Barcelona is a well known soccer club which plays in the Spanish League La Liga and during the 2009-2010 season they were unbeatable winning six major championships. You might wonder what their secret to success was during that season and if it is possible to analyze the aspects of their game better than existing methods. Can we analyze this using networks and concepts learnt in CSCC46? A recent study from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos proves that through using networks and analyzing it is possible to better understand the style of play.
First a network was created with nodes representing players in a particular game and an edge between each player existed if there was a pass between them at any time. The study also recorded the position of each player during the game. The network also contained a sliding window of 50 passes which will delete the very first edge as the game progresses and this helped in analysing different phases of the game.
What did this network reveal about the team? The network showed central team players through which the ball frequently passes through , triads between players who frequently passed the ball between each other and more. Calculating the clustering coefficient of this network concluded that Barcelona had one of best passing between neighbours of its players among all teams. It was also decided that Barcelona had the best shortest average paths which again shows the skill of passing across the team. The study also predicted probabilities of the team scoring a goal given a particular network.
It is interesting how a network of a sports team can reveal a lot more about the style of a team and I wonder what the potential uses of it are in the future. Maybe opposing team coaches can use this information to better tackle a strong team or to use some of the techniques and strategies in their own team to improve.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614440/network-science-reveals-the-secrets-of-the-worlds-best-soccer-team/