The Team Brain: Soccer Analysis and Battles of Minds

Soccer is one of the most successful sports of our times, and for various reasons. One such reason is its level of unpredictability: surprising results can occur, and it is still unclear what are the secrets that make a team winning or losing within a single game. In this paper we tackle the problem of soccer analysis from a different perspective: we transform every team, together with the playfield, into a network structure (the Team Brain), and we shift perspective, turning soccer games into battles of minds. We show how this approach proves to be successful, allowing to better understand what the recipes for the success of a team can be, and also getting a new, somehow surprising, view of what are the really important critical areas of a soccer field.