Modeling soccer matches by recurrence analyses

Abstract

The study aims at modeling soccer matches with recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). Positional data of 12 soccer matches from German Bundesliga out of the season 2009/2010 are used to produce global and local recurrence plots (RP) and perform the RQA. It is shown that RPs are representations of the soccer matches and the RQA parameters deliver descriptions of the matches.

MATHMOD 2022 Discussion Contribution Volume

“…Recurrence analysis represents such a method as it examines approximations of a trajectory in a phase space (Lames & Plück, 2015). The core component of the recurrence analysis is the recurrence plot (RP), which visualises the recurring patterns in a matrix (Eckmann et al, 1987).…”

“…Applications of the recurrence method in professional football can be found in the work of Lames & Plück (2015), Stöckl et al (2017) and Lames et al (2021). The results of these studies are promising, as they demonstrate the representational capacity of RPs in football matches (Lames & Plück, 2015), the unpredictability of the players' behaviour (Stöckl et al, 2017), significant correlations with common performance indicators (Lames et al, 2021) and a correlation of RPs and RQA parameters to open play (ibid.…”

Football Match Dynamics Explored by Recurrence Analysis

“…Traditional performance analysis mostly examines these aspects with respect to playing style (Fernández-Navarro et al, 2018;Gómez et al, 2018;Lago-Peñas et al, 2018;Castellano and Pic, 2019). Common performance indicators, e.g., such as ball possession or duels won (Sampaio and Leite, 2013), fail to meet these requirements because they provide only single figures that summarize a single aspect of the match (Lames and McGarry, 2015). Recent approaches in PA that reconstruct certain game aspects either by using machine learning techniques, such as the tactical line-up (Bialkowski et al, 2014), or by directly modeling certain constructs, such as the dominated region (Gonçalves et al, 2017), passing availability (Goes et al, 2021), or dangerousity (Link et al, 2016), are not designed for this purpose either.…”

“…The second application of RQA, and the reference to the present paper, is a study on football based on Lames and McGarry (2015). Twelve matches from the 2009 to 2010 Bundesliga season were analyzed with RPs and RQA.…”

Implementation of Recurrence Analysis algorithms in a dashboard for practical application in Football

“…Recurrence analysis represents such a method as it examines approximations of a trajectory in a phase space (Lames & Plück, 2015). The core component of the recurrence analysis is the recurrence plot (RP), which visualises the recurring patterns in a matrix (Eckmann et al, 1987).…”