Space and Control in Soccer

Abstract

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In many team sports, the ability to control and generate space in dangerous areas on the pitch is crucial for the success of a team. This holds, in particular, for soccer. In this study, we revisit ideas from Fernandez and Bornn (2018) who introduced interesting space-related quantities including pitch control (PC) and pitch value. We identify influence of the player on the pitch with the movements of the player and turn their concepts into data-driven quantities that give rise to a variety of different applications. Furthermore, we devise a novel space generation measure to visualize the strategies of the team and player. We provide empirical evidence for the usefulness of our contribution and showcase our approach in the context of game analyses.

Keywords

• soccer (football)
• movement model
• motion model
• pitch control
• soccer analytics