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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."
Points for not scoring? Isn't that the same as a woman telling you that she just wants to be friends because your friendship means more than a relationship would?
Of course, this is an incomplete metric for player worth.
How about off-ball activity that contributes? Moving across a zone or defender to clear space for someone who actually handles the ball? What about the guy who makes a brilliant cut but doesn't get served well by a teammate, so never handles the ball?
What about defense?
Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where ball control and quality opportunities is more important than number of shots. You could game this system very easily by cranking shots from 30 yards.
Soccer doesn't lend itself well to statistical analysis of players. That's one of the things that makes it a beautiful sport and fun to discuss, IMO.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
assigns points for precise passing and for passes that ultimately lead to a shot at the goal
calculates a skill index for each team and player.
Wow, that's really going to tell you about a players defensive skills, isn't it.
Not that those could possibly important in a game where usually only one or two balls make it to the net the whole game. I mean, it's not like defense would play much of a role there.
"If God had meant football to be played in the air he would have put grass in the sky" - Brian Clough
Doesn't measure defensive contributions and doesn't account for stronger defense against known good players. Someone remind these people that soccer is a team sport.
The fifa world cup, it infects everything. Especially those bloody vuvuzel-BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
If it rhymes it must be true.
Actually football (okay, soccer...) fantasy leagues follow quite simple metrics, it's just about goals, assists, yellow and red cards.
Some system takes into account only individual stats, others also team stats (eg, a bonus for a defender if his real team doesn't concede goals).
There may be some more or less convoluted bonus and combo rules (say, all your forwards score goals and all your defenders' teams don't concede...) but that's pretty much it.
Here's an example:
http://fantasy.premierleague.com/M/help.mc?category=scoring
Stats and metrics really don't belong to soccer, it's a game of subjective evaluations.
In fact, here in Italy (but I guess it's the same in other countries) sports newspapers evaluate players with grades after every match, to give a sense of how any of them performed.
You get a table with grades given by the journalist, in a scale from 1 to 10 just like in our school system, and our "fantacalcio" games are based on those numbers (plus all the various bonus and malus).
Pretty subjective, but that's part of the fun of soccer, the discussions about performances and matches are neverending as there aren't objective stats to call in to support your views. =)
Under those circumstances, Spain played an amazing game against Switzerland this week: Hundreds of accurate passes that ended in shots. More passes in one half than most teams make in an entire game. And yet, they didn't score, and lost the game against a team that had 25% ball position, but actually managed to score.
It would also mean that every Italian national team from the last 30 years happens to be terrible, despite their world championship titles.
If you've watched any English match in the past decade, you will see there are a slew of stats. When a player is on screen, stats are displayed such as: number of passes, % of passes completed, assists, shots, shots on target, tackles, total km run, and more.
On the other hand, as we've already had these stats for a decade or two we know how irrelevant they are. There are plenty of players that run around waving for the ball and when they get it simply knock it back or sideways in a manner that contributes little. They have great stats and may touch it in the build up to a goal but are far from being the architects.
Using the same software to analyse companies and creative team, mentioned in the article, that is a joke. As is the original researcher trying to understand why his team isn't winning when it only has one decent player.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
For the benefit of World Cup viewers, this may seem more familiar:
"Only a handful ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ exist, most ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ information: the ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ match, the number ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ a match's ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ So researchers ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Applying ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ the ball's ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ultimately ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ball's flow toward the goal ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ for each team and player."
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
I call that other game "American Rugby," since that's what it is.
Changa hates change.
There is only a handful of countries that need to distinguish between different football games. Most of the world has only one such a game, the one played in the World Cup right now, so calling it football is right in almost every country.
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.
It might also be a completely useless study of a pointless topic.
Also, completely WRONG as the very first commenter to TFA puts it:
ponckk
a team... can play as never before, and still loose, if they don't score.
A team that plays very poorly, can score, and win.....
look at the world cup history, and the majority of soccer matches.
Look at the debut of spain in the world cup...
your software is really nice and the algorithm has to be great. but it doesn't apply in real life.
thats why there arn't many stats in soccer, that is why is simple...GET THE BALL IN, thats what counts.
And your algorithm is leaving that out immediatly
Today, 02:27:4
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Trying to measure a qualitative activity with quantitative tools is meaningless.
I should read down the rest of this page to see if you're just trolling.
I tried to watch it...and just got a bit bored. The low scoring, and letting people tie just doesn't seem right to me for a competitive game.
What has the rate of scoring got to do with competitiveness? I'm kind of confused. Even baseball doesn't have humungously high scores.
Perhaps you'd prefer cricket, where a side can score several hundred points (known as 'runs') and take up to twenty wickets in a match.
As for ties. Only America thinks a draw is unacceptable in sport. The rest of the world copes quite easily with the concept.
Sometimes, just possibly, neither team is sufficiently better than the other to win the match. Why not allow the final score the reflect this?
Obviously this is the World Cup and so there'll be a knock-out cup format (instead of the league format, which is the current stage). As you can't knock someone out in the event of a draw (sorry, a 'tie') the rules permit the use of a couple of mechanisms to avoid this. First is a 30 minute period of extra time (erm, 'overtime'?) then there are penalties.
I don't understand that....I mean, I thought the world cup was analogous to to the Super Bowl in the US, something played every year to determine the champion.
Superbowl:
- Annual
- Play-off following league competition
- Only involves American teams
- Competed by professional sports clubs
World Cup:
- Every four years
- 2 year qualification involving regional qualifiers (in Europe taking the form of mini-leagues)
- Involves the entire world
- Competed by National teams
So no, not analogous to the Superbowl at all.
Is there not a soccer champion every year?
No. There are thousands.
E.g. the equivalent in Football terms to a Superbowl winner is whoever wins the MLS play-offs.
However, there are equivalents in the English Premier League, the Scottish Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the J League and.. well, every country has its own league competition, producing a champion.
Of course, there are also cup competitions. In England there's the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Johnson's Paint Trophy, the Community Shield and a number of lesser trophies competed for annually. There are also the Europe wide competitions such as the Intertoto Cup, the Europa League (which despite the name is a cup competition) and the Champions League (which despite the name is both a cup competition, and also involves non-champions).
Other continents have their own equivalents.
Each year there's also a World Club tournament, the winner of which are the World Club Champions.
Then there's the African Cup of Nations, which is a competition for national teams, which takes place at the start of each year.
Every four years (bisecting the world cup) there are the European Championships, in which the European national teams compete.
I'll stop now, but hopefully you at least have an inkling of just how much bigger this whole football thing is than something as inconsequential as the Superbowl in the US.