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Ranking Soccer Players By Following the Bouncing Ball
sciencehabit excerpts from an interesting report on statistics for soccer, in the stats-obsessed world of sports: "Only a handful of soccer ranking systems exist, most of which rely on limited information: the number of goals scored in a match, the number of goals assisted, and some indices of a match's difficulty and importance. ... So researchers turned to an unlikely source: social networks. Applying the kinds of mathematical techniques used to map Facebook friends and other networks, the team created software that can trace the ball's flow from player to player. As the program follows the ball, it assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal. Whether the shot succeeds doesn't matter. Only the ball's flow toward the goal and each player's role in getting it there factors into the program's point system, which then calculates a skill index for each team and player."
Defense is much harder than that. If I shut someone down and take their angles and force them to pass the ball backwards, I get 0 points. If I go for a tackle from a terrible angle and get blown by, I get the same. Even if you take away points, it's not able to count marking someone or positional play shutting things down. It just rewards defenders who are hard tacklers or good at poking a ball free.
That's scary.
The top UK teams (and others around the world I guess..) all use Prozone - http://www.prozonesports.com/
From what I have seen at the International Broadcasting Convention http://www.ibc.org/ some TV production companies do a fair bit of of markup on their footage too
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.