Comparison of individual playing styles in football

Abstract

This paper attempts to identify football players who have a similar style to a player of interest. Playing style is not adequately quantified with traditional statistics, and therefore style statistics are created using tracking data. Tracking data allow us to monitor players throughout a match, and therefore include both “on-the-ball” and “off-the-ball” observations. Having developed style features, tractable discrepancy measures are introduced that are based on Kullback–Leibler divergence in the context of multivariate normal distributions. Examples are provided where a pool of players from the Chinese Super League are identified as having a playing style that is similar to players of interest.