Abstract
A widely accepted notion of football matches in performance analysis (PA) is to consider them as dynamic interaction processes with emerging behaviors. The description and analysis of these processes requires specific methods. Recurrence analysis is a technique for analyzing complex systems in many domains like astrophysics, earth sciences, engineering, biology, cardiology, and neuroscience. Its general concept is to examine the recurrence behavior of a system, as in when, how often and how close its trajectory in a phase space returns to a previous state. The aim of the study is to apply recurrence analysis to football matches. Positional data from 21 football matches of a German Bundesliga team were examined. The phase space was made up of the field players' x,y-positions at each second of the match. For each pair of seconds, the average distance of all the players between their positions at these two time points was calculated. Recurrence plots (RPs) were obtained by color-coding these distances. With a recurrence threshold of rt = 9 m and a minimum line length of lmin = 3 s, general recurrence parameters were calculated to characterize the individual recurrence behaviors of each match. Three football-specific recurrence parameters were defined to represent recurrence properties of open play. RPs showed commonalities (typical features indicating set plays and continuous gameplay) as well as unique structures during each match (number, distribution, and sequence of typical features). The recurrence parameters showed several significant correlations with traditional performance indicators like number of goals and passes completed, e.g., the correlation between number of goals and recurrence rate is r = −0.622 (p = 0.003). By extending the sample and design of recurrence studies, there is great potential for recurrence analysis to improve both the practical and theoretical potential of performance analysis.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Miguel Pic, South Ural State University, Russia Kirsten Spencer, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
There are some striking features that occur in each Recurrence plots (RPs) of a football match
There is a red diagonal stripe which is typical of RPs, as the average distance of the players at time tx and ty with x = y is zero, and is smaller than any recurrence threshold
Summary
Reviewed by: Miguel Pic, South Ural State University, Russia Kirsten Spencer, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. A widely accepted approach to the performance analysis (PA) of football matches is to consider them as dynamic interaction processes with emerging behaviors (Gréhaigne et al, 1997; McGarry et al, 2014; see Parlebas, 2020). The reason for this is that, on the one hand, there are tactical plans in place that drive collective behavior to successfully achieve a team’s goals. Football Recurrence Analysis other from reaching their goals This leads to players frequently moving back and forth across the pitch, caused by within-team and between-team interactions (McGarry et al, 2002). From a dynamical systems perspective, actual behavior is considered the result of the self-organization between all of these factors, which leads to the final result— the perceivable behavior
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