Abstract
This study aims to illustrate the landscape of passing opportunities of a football team across a set of competitive matches. To do so positional data of 5 competitive matches was used to create polygons of pass availability. Passes were divided into three types depending on the hypothetical threat they may pose to the opposing defense (penetrative, support, and backwards passes). These categories were used to create three heatmaps per match. Moreover, the mean time of passing opportunities was calculated and compared across matches and for the three categories of passes. Due to the specificity of player’s interactive behavior, results showed heatmaps with a variety of patterns. Specifically the fifth match was very dissimilar to the other four. However, characterizing a football match in terms of passing opportunities with a single heatmap dismisses the variety of dynamics that occur throughout a match. Therefore, three temporal heatmaps over windows of 10 min were presented highlighting on-going dynamical changes in pass availability. Results also display that penetrative passes were available over shorter periods of time than backward passes that were available shorter than support passes. The results highlight the sensibility of the model to different task constrains that emerge within football matches.
Highlights
This study aims to illustrate the landscape of passing opportunities of a football team across a set of competitive matches
The players’ decisions and actions are highly influenced by prospective information that emerges in the course of the players’ interactive behavior, i.e. a temporary open gap in the opponent defense[5]. This information continuously suggests what to do, and when, where, and how to do it, highlighting ongoing possibilities of a ction[6,7,8]. This flow of prospective information is dynamically evolving over time[9], as it is influenced by the changing positioning of the players[6,7,10], as well as the players’ capability to perceive what the others can do[5,7,11,12]
Heterogeneous space–time spread of passing opportunities across the entire field was displayed, which highlighted the specificity of player’s interactive behaviour during the course of a match. These previous research works has some limitations some of them we aim to address : (1) instead of a single match analysis, on the current research work it was analysed the dynamics of the created landscapes, within and between a set of five competitive football matches; (2) the current research work drove us to the need of analyse the images created by the heatmaps beyond visual inspection
Summary
This study aims to illustrate the landscape of passing opportunities of a football team across a set of competitive matches. Heterogeneous space–time spread of passing opportunities across the entire field was displayed, which highlighted the specificity of player’s interactive behaviour during the course of a match These previous research works has some limitations some of them we aim to address : (1) instead of a single match analysis, on the current research work it was analysed the dynamics of the created landscapes, within and between a set of five competitive football matches; (2) the current research work drove us to the need of analyse the images created by the heatmaps beyond visual inspection. Beyond the influence of these specific constraints is it possible to depict a similarity on player’s interactive behaviour along a set of matches? Aiming to answer this question, the main goal of this study was to identify the landscapes of passing opportunities as a result of spatio-temporal windows that emerge due to the interactive behaviour between off-ball players, defenders, and the ball carrier during different football matches
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