Actions Speak Louder than Goals: Valuing Player Actions in Soccer

Published in

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(2018)

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TL;DR

A new language for describing individual player actions on the pitch and a framework for valuing any type of player action based on its impact on the game outcome while accounting for the context in which the action happened are introduced.

Abstract

Assessing the impact of the individual actions performed by soccer players during games is a crucial aspect of the player recruitment process. Unfortunately, most traditional metrics fall short in addressing this task as they either focus on rare actions like shots and goals alone or fail to account for the context in which the actions occurred. This paper introduces (1) a new language for describing individual player actions on the pitch and (2) a framework for valuing any type of player action based on its impact on the game outcome while accounting for the context in which the action happened. By aggregating soccer players' action values, their total offensive and defensive contributions to their team can be quantified. We show how our approach considers relevant contextual information that traditional player evaluation metrics ignore and present a number of use cases related to scouting and playing style characterization in the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 seasons in Europe's top competitions.

Authors

Jesse Davis

2 papers

Tom Decroos

1 papers

L. Bransen

1 papers

References37 items

Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to Perform Under Mental Pressure

Measuring soccer players’ contributions to chance creation by valuing their passes

Measuring Football Players' On-the-ball Contributions from Passes during Games

Automatic Discovery of Tactics in Spatio-Temporal Soccer Match Data

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ice Hockey for Context-Aware Player Evaluation

Actions Speak Louder than Goals: Valuing Player Actions in Soccer

Published in

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining(2018)

External Links:

Generate Graph DownloadPDF

TL;DR

Abstract

Authors

Jesse Davis

2 papers

Tom Decroos

1 papers

L. Bransen

1 papers

References37 items

Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to Perform Under Mental Pressure

Measuring soccer players’ contributions to chance creation by valuing their passes

Measuring Football Players' On-the-ball Contributions from Passes during Games

Automatic Discovery of Tactics in Spatio-Temporal Soccer Match Data

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ice Hockey for Context-Aware Player Evaluation

Jan Van Haaren

1 papers

STARSS: A Spatio-Temporal Action Rating System for Soccer

CatBoost: unbiased boosting with categorical features

Predicting Soccer Highlights from Spatio-Temporal Match Event Streams

QPass: a Merit-based Evaluation of Soccer Passes

XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System

A Markov Game Model for Valuing Player Actions in Ice Hockey

A Markov Model of Football: Using Stochastic Processes to Model a Football Drive

Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python

An experimental comparison of performance measures for classification

The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball

Predicting good probabilities with supervised learning

Using a Markov process model of an association football match to determine the optimal timing of substitution and tactical decisions

Markov Games as a Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Cooperative Games, Solutions and Applications

Decomposing the Immeasurable Sport: A deep learning expected possession value framework for soccer

Valuing passes in football using ball event data

Predicting goal probabilities for possessions in football Research Paper Business Analytics

http://www.optasportspro.com/about/optapro-blog/posts/2017/blog-howwe-assign-credit-in-football/ OptaPro Blog

How We Assign Credit in Football

Introducing xGChain

Valuing Individual Player Involvements in Norwegian Association Football

Expected Goals Model 2.0

Introducing My Expected Goals Model

Finding the Weak Link

"Quality vs Quantity": Improved Shot Prediction in Soccer using Strategic Features from Spatiotemporal Data

Premier League Projections and New Expected Goals

Beyond Shots: A New Approach to Quantifying Scoring Opportunities

POINTWISE: Predicting Points and Valuing Decisions in Real Time with NBA Optical Tracking Data

A Framework for Tactical Analysis and Individual Offensive Production Assessment in Soccer Using Markov Chains

An algorithm for valuing on-the-ball player actions as a concrete instance of the general framework, which is outlined in Section 4

A general framework for valuing player actions based on their contributions to the game outcome, which is introduced

Field of Study

PsychologyMathematicsComputer Science

Journal Information

Name

Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining

Venue Information

Name

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Type

conference

URL

http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/

Alternate Names

KDD
Knowl Discov Data Min

TL;DR

Abstract

Authors

References37 items

Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to Perform Under Mental Pressure

Measuring soccer players’ contributions to chance creation by valuing their passes

Measuring Football Players' On-the-ball Contributions from Passes during Games

Automatic Discovery of Tactics in Spatio-Temporal Soccer Match Data

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ice Hockey for Context-Aware Player Evaluation

TL;DR

Abstract

Authors

References37 items

Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to Perform Under Mental Pressure

Measuring soccer players’ contributions to chance creation by valuing their passes

Measuring Football Players' On-the-ball Contributions from Passes during Games

Automatic Discovery of Tactics in Spatio-Temporal Soccer Match Data

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Ice Hockey for Context-Aware Player Evaluation

PlayeRank

STARSS: A Spatio-Temporal Action Rating System for Soccer

CatBoost: unbiased boosting with categorical features

Predicting Soccer Highlights from Spatio-Temporal Match Event Streams

QPass: a Merit-based Evaluation of Soccer Passes

XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System

A Markov Game Model for Valuing Player Actions in Ice Hockey

A Markov Model of Football: Using Stochastic Processes to Model a Football Drive

Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python

An experimental comparison of performance measures for classification

The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball

Predicting good probabilities with supervised learning

Using a Markov process model of an association football match to determine the optimal timing of substitution and tactical decisions

Markov Games as a Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Cooperative Games, Solutions and Applications

Decomposing the Immeasurable Sport: A deep learning expected possession value framework for soccer

Valuing passes in football using ball event data

Predicting goal probabilities for possessions in football Research Paper Business Analytics

http://www.optasportspro.com/about/optapro-blog/posts/2017/blog-howwe-assign-credit-in-football/ OptaPro Blog

How We Assign Credit in Football

Introducing xGChain

Valuing Individual Player Involvements in Norwegian Association Football

Expected Goals Model 2.0

Introducing My Expected Goals Model

Finding the Weak Link

"Quality vs Quantity": Improved Shot Prediction in Soccer using Strategic Features from Spatiotemporal Data

Premier League Projections and New Expected Goals

Beyond Shots: A New Approach to Quantifying Scoring Opportunities

POINTWISE: Predicting Points and Valuing Decisions in Real Time with NBA Optical Tracking Data

A Framework for Tactical Analysis and Individual Offensive Production Assessment in Soccer Using Markov Chains

An algorithm for valuing on-the-ball player actions as a concrete instance of the general framework, which is outlined in Section 4

A general framework for valuing player actions based on their contributions to the game outcome, which is introduced

Field of Study

Journal Information

Name

Venue Information

Name

Type

URL

Alternate Names