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Routine Inspection: A Playbook for Corner Kicks

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Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1324))

Abstract

 We present a set of tools for identifying and studying the offensive and defensive strategies used by football teams in corner kick situations: their corner playbooks. Drawing from methods in topic modelling, our tools classify corners based on the runs made by the attacking players, enabling us to identify the distinct corner routines used by individual teams and search tracking data to find corners that exhibit specific features of interest. We use a supervised machine learning approach to identify whether individual defenders are marking man-to-man or zonally and study the positioning of zonal defenders over many matches. We demonstrate how our methods can be used for opposition analysis by highlighting the offensive and defensive corner strategies used by teams in our data over the course of a season.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Measuring positions one second after the first ball event helps to identify the target position of players aiming to reach a flick-on.

  2. 2.

    Our methodology does not identify the specific opponent a defender is man-marking.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge Devin Pleuler at Toronto FC for his advice and insights, and Tiago Maia and Jan Schimpchen from SL Benfica for helping to produce the training data for our defensive role classification model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

    Laurie Shaw

  2. Benfica SL, Lisbon, Portugal

    Sudarshan Gopaladesikan

Authors
  1. Laurie Shaw
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  2. Sudarshan Gopaladesikan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laurie Shaw .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg, Germany

    Ulf Brefeld

  2. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jesse Davis

  3. SciSports, Amersfoort, The Netherlands

    Jan Van Haaren

  4. Université de Caen Normandie, Caen, France

    Albrecht Zimmermann

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Shaw, L., Gopaladesikan, S. (2020). Routine Inspection: A Playbook for Corner Kicks. In: Brefeld, U., Davis, J., Van Haaren, J., Zimmermann, A. (eds) Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics. MLSA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1324. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64912-8_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64912-8_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64911-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64912-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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