Tactical Analysis Through Objective Data in Football

Abstract

Tactical analysis in football has rarely been conducted using a mathematical model with numerical data (although tactical analysis through objective data has been used more often). Therefore, this study establishes principles for tactical analysis in team sports using numerical data, through a mathematical model based on the location of the players and the ball. A competitive match between Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) and Ehime FC (away) in the third round of the Japanese Emperor’s Cup 2011 was filmed and used for the match analysis. Observations were made by a team analyst as well as extracted from official match records. The main procedure in the research flow was to establish a mathematical offence/defence model based on tactical concepts in football, which was applied for the location of players, which, in turn, was quantified from video images in order to categorise a team’s tactical performance (in relation to attacking or defending). Furthermore, the authors focused on attacking categories and identified different types of passes during a specific period, as well as comparing these findings with an actual match video. The results obtained from the numerical data derived from applying the offence/defence model led to the same overview as the tactical analysis produced by a team analyst. In addition, the results when categorising types of passes (as extracted through the mathematical model) again mirrored those retrieved from an actual match video. This leads to the conclusion that the offence/defence model could provide relevant insight into types of attacks. The data revealed that football tactical analysis can be successfully performed using a numerical model, which might possibly enable automatic tactical analysis of football games without a match analyst.