Characteristic Analysis of Midfielder in Japanese Professional Football League (J1 League) Using Grouping and Tactical Analysis

Abstract

The level of soccer in Japan is getting higher and higher. This is due to the fact that more and more players belong to overseas teams. However, if this trend continues, there is a possibility that the level of soccer in Japan will decline again. One of the reasons why j-league players are not selected for the national team is that there are few objective indicators of player characteristics, and they are easily influenced by the judgment of their team’s coaches and managers. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze and visualize the characteristics of players. In this study, the analysis was conducted on midfielder players in the J1 League. The reason why we chose the position of midfielder among many positions is that it plays an important factor in both offense and defense. The analysis was initially done by principal component analysis to create new variables to understand the characteristics of the players. Then, a hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted on the principal component scores to divide the players into several groups and identify their characteristics. As a result, we were able to classify them into seven distinctive groups.