Visual Analysis of Goal-Leading Phases in Soccer

Abstract

This work focuses on the use of a specific type of visualization to analyze soccer matches and highlight individual players’ goal contributions. An analytic approach in team sports is nowadays considered crucial by both practitioners and other interested parties such as fans or betters. In soccer, the analysis of sequences of passes and shoots can help the analysts understanding some aspects of the performance of players and teams. We show how, through a compact representation of n-ary temporal relationship, users can get a comprehensive view of the evolution of the passes leading to a goal in several matches. The dataset considered in this work contains data from the first 26 weeks of the season 2019-2020 of the Italian major soccer league.