Dynamic Network Analysis of the Euro2016 Final: Preliminary Results

Social networks have been applied in football, or football match analysis to analyze the passing distributions between teams. However, analysis has been mostly done on a manually collected data by considering the widely adopted network metrics such as betweenness and closeness centrality. In this paper, we use professional tracking event data provided by OPTA Sports and analyze the final game of the Euro2016 between Portugal and France. We use Gephi and the NetworkX Python library and apply dynamic network analysis by integrating the timestamps of the passes. We further look into traditional performance metrics from both teams and make an attempt to connect those to the network results and the outcome of the game.