A flexible approach to football analytics: Assessment, modeling and implementation

Abstract

Quantitative analysis in football is difficult due to the complexity and continuous fluidity of the game. Even though there is an increased accessibility of spatio-temporal data, scientific approaches to extract valuable information are seldomly useful in practice. We propose a new approach to building an information system for football. This approach consists of a method to extract football-specific concepts from interviews, to formalize them in a performance model, and to define and implement the data structures and algorithms in StreamTeam, a framework for the detection of complex (team) events. In this paper we present this approach in detail and provide an example for its use.