un-xPass: Measuring Soccer Player's Creativity

Abstract

Creativity is highly valued in soccer players. It contributes to exciting and unpredictable play, which can help teams to overcome defensive strategies and create scoring opportunities. Consequently, evaluating the creative abilities of players is an important aspect of the player recruitment process. However, there is currently no clear way to measure creativity in soccer. It is not captured by the typical result-based performance indicators, as being creative entails going beyond just doing something useful, to accomplishing something useful but in a unique or atypical way. Therefore in this paper, we define a novel metric to quantify the level of creativity involved in a player's passes. Our Creative Decision Rating (CDR) utilizes machine learning techniques to assess two important factors: the originality of a pass, and its value in terms of increasing the team's chances of scoring a goal. We validated our metric on StatsBomb 360 contextual event stream data of the 2021/22 English Premier League season and show through a number of use cases that it provides another angle on a player's skill, complementing existing player evaluation metrics. Overall, our metric provides a concise method for capturing and quantifying the creativity of soccer players and could have important implications for player recruitment and talent development in the sport. CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing; • Computing methodologies → Model development and analysis; Machine learning;

Contextualizing Evaluation of Performance in Volleyball: Introducing Contextual Individual Contribution Coefficients to Assess Technical Actions

“…Finally, it is important to acknowledge that involving elite-level coaches in assigning numerical values to player actions can be insightful; yet it carries the risk of introducing subjective biases and potential assessment variations. In football, the integration of AI and machine learning (Davis et al, 2022;Robberechts et al, 2023) has proven beneficial in understanding various dimensions of performance, uncovering trends, strategic insights, and even predicting performance. A possible introduction of concepts akin to Expected Goals (XG) would enhance the weighing of actions and explore interactions (Hewitt & Karakus ¸, 2023).…”