Guardiola’s Legendary 2008 Barcelona Team and Networks

Anyone that considers themselves a football/soccer fan knows just how legendary Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona team really was. With their Tiki-Taka style of football and top caliber players such as Leo Messi, Ronaldinho, Xavi, and Iniesta, they absolutely steamrolled the competition. Within this blog post I will use network science to analyze this Barcelona team.

Within this blog I will specifically be analyzing matches with what is called a “passing network”. In passing networks players are our nodes and their passes between each other are the edges with the edges taking into account the volume of passes between the players.

Above is the average passing network for Barcelona in 2009/2010 against Real Madrid. The width of the edges are representative of the volume of passes made between players. Looking at the graph just at a glance there is tons of useful information that we can glean about the playstyle of the team. We can easily observe some of the basic habits of Barcelona in this game. A few of these simple observations include the long passing of the goalkeeper Victor Valdes to Dani Alves and Abidal, by observing the thickness off the edges going outward from Busquets we can see just how much he passes forward to his midfield partners Xavi and Iniesta, the size of the nodes in this graph also are relative to eigenvector centrality which is is an algorithm that measures the transitive influence of nodes, so with that we can also see just how influential players that get often overlooked Busquets are.

These are just some of the many observations we can make by looking at these kinds of passing networks. Much deeper analysis of this network can be done to gain even more insights on the playstyle of any team and specific matches.

Resource: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49969-2