Performance Analysis of Everton Football Club Based on Tracking Data

Competitive team sports are one of the most informative scenarios in the research of team cooperation analysis. However, there is a lack of simple, robust and accurate key event-based methods when evaluating the performance of a soccer team. In this paper, we first built a ball-passing network to facilitate teamwork analysis of a soccer team, with the help of which we then proposed a novel model for quality assessment based on highlight moments to evaluate the performance of the team. Further, we develop a third model to identify the rhythm conversion of offensive/defensive tactics so as to quantify them. Using spatiotemporal tracking data of key events in 38 Premier League games, a comprehensive and systematic analysis is formed on the performance of both the team staff and players of the Everton Football Club. Also, the key factors to the match result are quantitatively explored and modeled.