Abstract
Visual perception in football ("soccer" in the U.S.) is increasingly becoming a key area of interest for researchers and practitioners. This exploratory case study investigated a sub-set of visual perception, namely visual exploratory scanning. The aim of this study was to examine the scanning of four elite football midfield players in an 11 vs. 11 real-game environment using mobile eye-tracking technology. More specifically, we measured the duration and information (number of teammates and opponents) of the players' scanning behavior. The results showed that the players' scanning duration was influenced by the ball context and the action undertaken with the ball at the moment of scan initiation. Furthermore, fixations were found in only 2.3% of the scans. Additionally, the results revealed that the stop point is the most information-rich part of a scan and that the players had more opponents than teammates inside their video frame during scans. Practical applications and further research recommendations are presented.
Highlights
Visual perception is crucial for performance across different sports [1]
One additional player, who was part of the data collection, was excluded from the analysis based on this criterion to ensure that all players were elite, consistent with previous scanning studies [24, 25]. Data from those five players’ eye tracking records was used in another study, which exclusively focused on the fixations of the players [8] compared to the current study, which exclusively looks at the scanning of the players
Ball action refers to the action that was undertaken with the ball at the exact moment the scan was initiated. This was divided into five categories: (a) receiving/dribbling touch, (b) during pass, (c) out of play, (d) control, no touch, and (e) moment of Scanning of elite football players: An eye-tracking analysis pass
Summary
Visual perception is crucial for performance across different sports [1]. Our current knowledge of visual gaze behavior in sports, and football in particular, is primarily based on studies of eye-movement registrations in laboratory settings using eye-tracking equipment [3]. These studies have provided empirical knowledge about football players’ gaze behavior through the examination of fixation durations, fixation frequencies, and fixation locations in different video-simulated tasks and viewpoints between participants of different skill levels (for a review, see [4]). Roca et al [5] found that participants in an 11 vs. 11 video scenario fixated their gaze differently when the ball was near to the viewpoint of a central defender compared to when it was far away.
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