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"Does 4-4-2 exist?" --: An Analytics Approach to Understand and Classify Football Team Formations in Single Match Situations

Published: 15 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The chance to win a football match can be significantly increased if the right tactic is chosen and the behavior of the opposite team is well anticipated. For this reason, every professional football club employs a team of game analysts. However, at present game performance analysis is done manually and therefore highly time-consuming. Consequently, automated tools to support the analysis process are required. In this context, one of the main tasks is to summarize team formations by patterns such as 4-4-2 that can give insights into tactical instructions and patterns. In this paper, we introduce an analytics approach that automatically classifies and visualizes the team formation based on the players' position data. We focus on single match situations instead of complete halftimes or matches to provide a more detailed analysis. %in contrast to previous work. The novel classification approach calculates the similarity based on pre-defined templates for different tactical formations. A detailed analysis of individual match situations depending on ball possession and match segment length is provided. For this purpose, a visual summary is utilized that summarizes the team formation in a match segment. An expert annotation study is conducted that demonstrates 1)~the complexity of the task and 2)~the usefulness of the visualization of single situations to understand team formations. The suggested classification approach outperforms existing methods for formation classification. In particular, our approach gives insights into the shortcomings of using patterns like 4-4-2 to describe team formations.

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  1. "Does 4-4-2 exist?" --: An Analytics Approach to Understand and Classify Football Team Formations in Single Match Situations

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        MMSports '19: Proceedings Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports
        October 2019
        120 pages
        ISBN:9781450369114
        DOI:10.1145/3347318
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        Published: 15 October 2019

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        Author Tags

        1. annotation study
        2. formation classification
        3. pattern analysis
        4. sports analytics

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        • (2024)Automatic Formation Recognition in Handball Using Template MatchingProceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Computer Science in Sport (IACSS 2023)10.1007/978-981-97-2898-5_2(10-17)Online publication date: 23-May-2024
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