A Social Network Analysis of Football - Evaluating Player and Team Performance

Audience engagement is key for broadcasting agencies, who purchase rights for huge sums of money for telecasting football. One way to do this, is to improve the overall quality of the pre-match and post-match analysis provided. Furthermore, analysis performed using sophisticated data driven approaches can also provide strategical advantages to teams. This work provides for novel techniques to predict and evaluate the performance of football teams and players based on the passing distribution statistics. The passing distributions data is mainly composed of how players successfully pass the ball around between each other which results in a goal or other events over the course of the game. Furthermore, this is the first work to use similarity analysis across teams to compare and evaluate teams.