Abstract
Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the spatio-temporal events during matches in the last World Cups to compare male and female teams based on their technical performance. We train an artificial intelligence model to recognize if a team is male or female based on variables that describe a match's playing intensity, accuracy, and performance quality. Our model accurately distinguishes between men's and women's football, revealing crucial technical differences, which we investigate through the extraction of explanations from the classifier's decisions. The differences between men's and women's football are rooted in play accuracy, the recovery time of ball possession, and the players' performance quality. Our methodology may help journalists and fans understand what makes women's football a distinct sport and coaches design tactics tailored to female teams.
Highlights
Women’s football took its first steps thanks to the independent women of the Kerr Ladies team, who gave the most significant impetus to this sport since the early twentieth-century [1]
We explore the spatial distribution of the positions where male and female players perform free kicks and shots (Fig 2) and quantify shooting distance Shot distance (ShotD) as the Euclidean distance
Female teams have a higher percentage of shots from their Z1 zone than male teams (p-value = 0.01); the opposite is true in the Z2 shooting area (p-value = 0.004)
Summary
Women’s football took its first steps thanks to the independent women of the Kerr Ladies team, who gave the most significant impetus to this sport since the early twentieth-century [1]. Sakellaris [9] finds that, in international football competitions, female teams have a higher average number of goals scored per match than their male counterparts. Opening the classifier’s black box allows us to reveal that, while the game’s intensity is similar, the differences between men’s and women’s football are rooted in play accuracy, time to recover ball possession, and the typical performance quality of the players. A deeper understanding of female and male performance and playing style differences may help coaches and athletic trainers design training sessions, strategies, and tactics tailored for Explaining the difference between men’s and women’s football women players. Our results may help sports journalists tell, and football fans understand what makes women’s football a distinct sport
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