Distinguishing Between Roles of Football Players in Play-by-play Match Event Data
This addresses the player recruitment challenge for professional football clubs, which is incremental as it builds on existing data analysis methods.
The paper tackled the problem of determining if football players fit a team's playing style by proposing 21 player roles and introducing a method to automatically identify applicable roles from play-by-play event data.
Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate reinforcements, many professional football clubs have access to extensive video footage and advanced statistics. However, the question whether a given player would fit the team's playing style often still remains unanswered. In this paper, we aim to bridge that gap by proposing a set of 21 player roles and introducing a method for automatically identifying the most applicable roles for each player from play-by-play event data collected during matches.