Unlocking the potential of big data to support tactical performance analysis in professional soccer: A systematic review

In professional soccer, increasing amounts of data are collected that harness great potential when it comes to analysing tactical behaviour. Unlocking this potential is difficult as big data challenges the data management and analytics methods commonly employed in sports. By joining forces with computer science, solutions to these challenges could be achieved, helping sports science to find new insights, as is happening in other scientific domains. We aim to bring multiple domains together in the context of analysing tactical behaviour in soccer using position tracking data. A systematic literature search for studies employing position tracking data to study tactical behaviour in soccer was conducted in seven electronic databases, resulting in 2338 identified studies and finally the inclusion of 73 papers. Each domain clearly contributes to the analysis of tactical behaviour, albeit in - sometimes radically - different ways. Accordingly, we present a multidisciplinary framework where each domain's contributions to feature construction, modelling and interpretation can be situated. We discuss a set of key challenges concerning the data analytics process, specifically feature construction, spatial and temporal aggregation. Moreover, we discuss how these challenges could be resolved through multidisciplinary collaboration, which is pivotal in unlocking the potential of position tracking data in sports analytics.

How visual information influences coordination dynamics when following the leader

Coordinating one's movements with others is an important aspect of human interactions. Regulating the distance to other moving agents is often necessary to achieve specific task goals such as in invasion sports. This study aimed to examine how distance regulation is mediated by different sources of information that are typically available when humans coordinate their actions to others. Participants followed a virtual leader that moved backwards and forwards, and were instructed to maintain the initial distance. In one condition, participants were presented with a life-size fully animated human avatar as the leader, displaying both segmental (limb motion) and global (optical expansion) motion information. In the other condition, participants had to follow an expanding and receding sphere in which segmental motion information was absent. Optical expansion rates revealed that participants regulated distance equally effective in both conditions. Given the phase relation and response times to direction changes however, the timing to the leader appeared to be more accurate in the avatar condition. These results provide support that forward-backward following can indeed be successfully mediated through global information, but that detection of segmental information allows for earlier tuning to another person's movement intentions.