Scale-free Property of the Passing Behaviour in a Team Sport

This study examined the application of network theory to skilled passing behaviour in a team sport by considering small-world and scale-free network models. Using data obtained from a 2006 soccer game in Japan between Japan and Ghana, we counted the number of passes by each player within 5-minute intervals. The structural properties of the passing behaviour, which included a characteristic path length and clustering coefficient, and the degree of distribution were analysed. This showed that the structural property of the passing behaviour represented neither a complete graph nor a random graph; rather, it reflected a small-world or scale-free network. In addition, the probabilities of outgoing and incoming passes reflected links that followed a power-law distribution. Passing behaviour in a soccer match appeared to be similar to behaviour in social networks with smaller vertices in terms of the scale-free property and a self-organising mechanism.