The Network Theory of Sports
This article proposed a novel application of network theory: to study the passing strategies of soccer teams. This network is constructed using the players as nodes and the passes as edges. This relates naturally to the first lecture of this course, when we described the versatility and growing number of applications for applying networks. With this basis, the researchers were able to analyze various passing patterns, concluding that FC Barcelona utilizes far more ABAB patterns than other teams. The article attributes this result to Barcelona’s “tiki-taka”, a style of play “characterized by rapid short passes and fast movement by the players”.
I feel that these types of models are still in their infancy. It seems to me that their network structure does not account for time, though tiki-taka relies on it. Also, aside from Barcelona, the network isn’t entirely helpful. I mean, nearly every other team rests in a huge clump in an unlabeled graph – how helpful is this? Besides identifying Barcelona as an outlier, in general this specific network does not enable meaningful comparisons between teams.
Lastly, I wonder what the future of these types of network theory applications holds. The article touches on the idea that more and more information is becoming available to study; in the future, will this include the precise locations of every player at every second during the game? If we had even more information in real-time, could we apply network theory to abstract the data to the team level? The idea that an entire team’s formation and strategy can be encapsulated in network theory really excites me.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530791/how-network-theory-is-revealing-previously-unknown-patterns-in-sports/