Soccer Analytics

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26 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Oct 8, 2026

Credit Attribution in Timestamped Soccer Networks Using Multivariate Hawkes Processes

The two main traditional player statistics used in soccer are goals scored and assists, with an assist credited when a player's pass immediately leads to a teammate scoring. Attributing credit solely to the player who makes the final pass before a goal fails to account for the contributions of multiple players in the buildup to the goal. Consequently, traditional statistics provide only a limited view of player involvement. In this paper, we use multivariate Hawkes processes (MHPs) to model timestamped sequences of passes and shots, which form continuous-time networks. MHPs provide a branching mechanism where an event (a pass or shot) can be generated as a child of a previous event, which allows us to quantify each pass's contribution to a subsequent pass or shot. This approach distributes credit across multiple passes within an attacking sequence, making it applicable across a wide range of situations. Building on this framework, we propose expected goal involvements (xGI), a metric that measures a player's involvement in creating goal scoring opportunities based on their passes. This metric identifies players who play key roles in creating goal scoring opportunities even if they do not make the final pass, offering a more comprehensive measure of attacking involvement and player performance.

Phillip W. Kornberg, Kevin S. Xu

Case Western Reserve University 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106-7071, USA

Soccer Analytics Fine-Grained Credit Assignment Temporal Credit Assignment

Sep 22, 2026

SambaGraph: Action-Reaction Spatio-Temporal Graphs for Soccer Tactical Response Modeling

Soccer tactics are interactive: an attacking action changes the opponent's defensive problem, and the observed response depends on the multi-agent match state. We introduce SambaGraph, an action--reaction spatio-temporal graph dataset and benchmark for soccer tactical response modeling. From tracking and event data for all 64 matches of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, we curate 4,070 action-centered episodes represented as temporally aligned 23-node player--ball graph sequences with attack/defense views, response labels, and 26,270 split-safe attack--defense pairs. We study three questions: whether observed responses can be classified from graph episodes, whether successful defenses can be retrieved for a query attack, and whether graph-derived summaries support grounded LLM reasoning. A compact signature MLP obtains

0.796\pm0.007

macro-F1 for response classification, while a fused graph--signature dual encoder reaches

0.471\pm0.029

Hit@5 and

0.655\pm0.051

Hit@10 for full-bank defensive retrieval. Hard negatives maximize pair discrimination but not retrieval quality. Local LLMs underperform supervised encoders for direct classification and do not improve over a strong original order in eight-candidate reranking, but they provide grounded tactical rationales. These results position SambaGraph as a reproducible benchmark for graph-based soccer strategy-response research. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/areyesan/SambaGraph.

Abel A. Reyes-Angulo, Henry O. Velesaca, Steven Araujo

Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA · SambaSports AI, Guayaquil, Ecuador · ESPOL Polytechnic University, Guayaquil, Ecuador +1

Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics Spatiotemporal GNNs Sports Analytics

Sep 21, 2026

Graph-to-Grid (G2G): Continuous-Coordinate Feature Painting for Soccer Pass Surfaces

Dense pass surfaces give, for every pitch cell, whether a pass played there would arrive, whether the carrier would choose it, and what the possession would then be worth. The networks that draw them read the state as a raster of per-cell counts, losing where inside a cell each player stands. LiDAR detectors, bird's-eye-view perception and graph weather models move entity features onto a grid, binning each entity to a cell or learning the transfer. We evaluate the interpolated form: each player's features are scattered bilinearly onto the grid at the player's measured coordinates, so the surface loss trains the per-player encoder end to end. Those systems adopt an interface; this paper measures one. On 53,628 passes from the 2022 World Cup, painting improves selection likelihood over the same core fed rasters alone by about a quarter of a nat: in every match of an eight-fold cross-validation, with every arm tuned over five seeds, and after retraining on seven Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga matches from another provider. Thirteen pre-specified studies locate the gain: painting the nine raw player features with no encoder carries three quarters of it, and the learned encoder and message passing add a smaller, resolved increment. Painting also helps the original SoccerMap and a canonical U-Net, whereas offset channels, a finer raster, an attention painter and a raster-free decoder do not. Frozen across the provider boundary the likelihood advantage is lost; injected tracking error compresses it. These results concern observed-endpoint prediction, not calibrated evaluation of hypothetical passes.

Kaan Günay, Orhun Gun

Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Graph Representation Learning Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics

Sep 10, 2026

AI Soccer Analyst: Stage-Aware and Verifiable Human-AI Collaboration for Soccer Data Analysis

Sports data analysts translate domain questions into insights by combining computation with sport-specific domain expertise. Large language models ease programming, but prompt-to-report workflows may obscure decisions and evidence. We present AI Soccer Analyst, a mixed-initiative system with revisable stages: Data Understanding, Problem Definition, Structured Planning, Execution, Evidence-Grounded Reporting, and Interaction and Refinement. A formative study with five analysts first informed design goals for automation, verifiability, human control, and accessibility. Subsequently, a task-based evaluation with 16 participants combined system logs, retained artifacts, ratings, and open responses; 33 of 48 tasks met the operational completion criteria. Exploratory tests supported favorable participant perceptions of completed-task output quality, task achievement, reliability, and verifiability after Holm correction. Interaction records showed domain knowledge emerging through clarification, planning, and refinement. These findings position stage-aware human-AI collaboration as a practical approach for producing inspectable, revisable, and verifiable analyses while retaining domain-expert involvement in consequential decisions.

Calvin Yeung, Keisuke Fujii

Nagoya University Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

Sports Analytics Human-in-the-Loop AI Shared Autonomy Human-AI Collaboration Soccer Analytics

Sep 9, 2026

How Much Velocity Does Off-Ball Space Value Need? A Broadcast-Viewport Benchmark

Velocity-aware pitch control is standard, but under a broadcast viewport half the players are off screen and on-screen velocities come from a drifting calibration. We ask at which layer of broadcast off-ball analysis velocity changes the answer. Inheriting our off-screen imputation protocol (three Metrica matches, 44 m viewport, block-bootstrap CIs), we score four velocity regimes -- none, viewport-legal observed, true-for-visible, true-for-all -- against a velocity-aware ground truth at three layers: imputation, the control surface, and team verdicts. Velocity is nearly useless for imputation (-0.2 pp against a 12--14 pp velocity-free surface MAE), first-order for the surface (-1.5 to -1.8 pp, 11--15% of that MAE), and ten times smaller for verdicts (-0.12 to -0.19 pp). The velocity that matters is the visible channel: perfect occluded-player velocity adds 2--6% of the visible gain, and no last-seen decay policy we tested exceeds that. Omitting velocity blurs the surface (per-frame |e| 2.2--2.6 pp) with small time-averaged bias (per cell <=0.4 pp), whereas imputation error is a structured bias against the defending team's deep zone (5--9 pp). At a fixed velocity window, a noise ladder of eleven jitter settings, including sigma_v-matched pairs, is ordered to first order by one velocity-noise axis sigma_v with break-even ~1 m/s; eleven SoccerNet-GSR clips from one match through our pipeline measure sigma_v=1.65 m/s yet recover 24--36% of the benefit: 43% of the variance is frame-common, which the surface tolerates, and the residual is heavy-tailed and clustered, which Gaussian controls matched on component RMS do not reproduce (+0.03 vs. +0.36). The share of velocity-free error that velocity removes grows with viewport width (7% at 36 m, 21% at 60 m): fix imputation on tight shots, velocity on wide ones. Code and logs are released.

Seongjin Choi

Independent researcher.

Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics Sports Analytics

Sep 4, 2026

Hierarchical Possession-Aware Graph Pointer Network for Pass Receiver Selection

Pass receiver selection is a fundamental task in football analytics, aiming to predict the intended receiver under a given game state. This task is challenging with event-centered freeze-frame observations, a broadcast-like setting that provides only partial and variable player visibility without complete trajectories or stable player identities. The model must therefore reason over anonymous visible candidates, opponent pressure, and recent context under partial observation. To address this setting, we propose a Hierarchical Possession-aware Graph Pointer Network (HPGPN), which formulates pass receiver selection as variable-size candidate prediction over visible teammates. HPGPN jointly models current player interactions, local event context, and possession-level temporal dynamics. It represents the current pass situation with a graph, incorporates fixed event context, and uses dynamic possession history to capture how the attacking sequence evolves. Candidate representations are refined hierarchically by integrating spatial, contextual, and historical evidence, and a glimpse pointer head scores the receiver candidates. Experiments on public football event and freeze-frame data show that HPGPN improves pass receiver selection performance. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of graph-based interaction modeling, fixed event context, and dual-branch dynamic possession-history modeling.

Jingyi Wang, Da Li, Kaixin Wang +1

Beijing Engineering Research Center for IoT Software and Systems, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Intelligent Technologies in Sports Medicine and Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

Pointer Networks Graph Neural Networks Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics

Aug 11, 2026

Capturing Uncertainty in Human Motion for Representation Learning in Soccer

This paper presents a self-supervised representation learning framework for understanding 3D skeleton-based human motion in soccer, using future motion prediction as the learning objective. Since human motion is inherently uncertain, accounting for multiple plausible futures is essential for capturing the underlying motion dynamics and learning effective representations. To this end, we introduce a conditioning module for motion prediction that models a probabilistic distribution over discretized future motions in 3D Euclidean space, learning multimodality with explicit supervision from future trajectories. Experiments on large-scale soccer player tracking data show that our approach substantially improves motion prediction accuracy. Moreover, the learned representations effectively transfer to multiple soccer downstream applications, demonstrating strong cross-task generalization.

Yizhou Xu, Lars Bretzner, Tiesheng Wang +1

KTH Royal Institute of Technology · EA Sports TRACAB

Self-Supervised Time Series Representation Learning Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics Predictive Representation Learning Human Motion Prediction Multimodal Trajectory Prediction+1

Aug 10, 2026

Space-Creating versus Dead Possession: An Off-Ball Possession-Quality Index for Broadcast Football

Ball possession is the most-cited and most-misleading number in football: 60% recycled in one's own half is not 60% spent pinning the opponent back. Existing event-based possession-value frameworks (expected threat, VAEP, on-ball value) price on-ball actions but ignore the off-ball question a sterile possession poses: did holding the ball create space, or was the circulation dead? We answer this in two layers. First, an event-side junk-possession index prices each possession sequence by its peak threat gain under an expected-threat grid and -- after reconstructing the live scoreline to exclude lead-protecting circulation -- flags low-threat sequences in tied-or-losing states. On the 2026 FIFA World Cup (103 matches, 206 team-matches) the flag correlates negatively with points (r=-0.37) and xG difference (r=-0.51, partly index-coupled). It is not a repackaging of on-ball value: with team offensive VAEP and field tilt held fixed, the junk flag stays strongly negatively associated with points (p<0.0001, also match-clustered) while VAEP is not significant -- in this same-match (descriptive) regression it adds information beyond this on-ball action-value model. Second, for a flagged window we resolve whether it was spatially dead or space-creating by projecting broadcast video to pitch coordinates and measuring a Space-Creation Index (SCI): a net pitch-control change capturing whether the possession seized space or pushed the opponent's block back. Across 31 of 35 flagged windows from nine World Cup matches (a purposive sample), 74% are spatially non-space-creating, 19% weak progression, and 6% space-creating windows the event flag alone would score as failure -- including a side with 73% of the ball that exited on penalties (two non-creating windows). The two layers separate space-creating-but-unconverted from sterile possession, a distinction event-only on-ball value cannot make.

Seongjin Choi

Independent researcher.

Soccer Analytics Sports Analytics

Aug 5, 2026

From Score Matrices to Football-Aware Match-State Simulation: An Auditable LLM Harness for Exact-Score Reranking

Football score forecasting combines a strong statistical core with a difficult contextual edge. Dynamic Poisson-family models estimate team strength, expected goals, and coherent score probabilities, but do not directly understand roles, tactical matchups, motivation, or how a first goal changes behaviour. Large language models (LLMs) can reason about such concepts, yet are not calibrated probability engines. We combine both components through an auditable information harness. This paper documents four iterations: V1, a dynamic score-driven Dixon-Coles baseline; V2, which maps LLM contextual ratings back into expected-goal parameters; V3, which replaces scalar correction with goal-by-goal simulations over a frozen score-candidate set; and V4, which adds shared first-breakthrough and post-goal cascade judgments, time-aware stopping, and deterministic tail candidates. The harness defines input semantics, supplies pre-match evidence, and constrains the LLM to an inspectable reasoning route. On a chronological replay of the first 150 matches of the 2025-26 English Premier League, V1 achieved 10.0% Top-1 and 26.7% Top-3 exact-score accuracy. V3 reached 12.0% and 30.0%, while V4 reached 14.7% and 30.7%. V4 increased candidate coverage from 77.3% to 84.7%, although no added tail candidate became a Top-3 exact hit. V1's native 1X2 distribution achieved 53.3% argmax accuracy, 0.9878 log loss, 0.5870 Brier score, and 0.2095 ranked probability score. These results are exploratory: the development slice is not an untouched benchmark, and temporal input isolation cannot exclude outcome memory in a closed LLM. The contribution is an auditable hybrid architecture, a clear design evolution, and negative findings showing where football-aware simulation does and does not improve score selection.

Shaopeng Liang

Independent Researcher

Probabilistic Forecasting LLM Reranking Sports Outcome Prediction Soccer Analytics

Jul 13, 2026

Training-Free Off-Screen Player Imputation for Broadcast-Based Spatial Football Analytics

Spatial football metrics such as pitch control assume access to the positions of all 22 players, yet the most widely available source of positional data -- the broadcast main camera -- shows only 10-16 of them at any moment. We quantify the resulting distortion with an open, reproducible benchmark: a simulated broadcast viewport applied to open full-pitch tracking data (Metrica Sports; three matches, one held out from method development). Ignoring off-screen players -- the visible-only baseline implied whenever a video-based game-state-reconstruction (GSR) pipeline adds no imputation layer -- inflates hidden-zone pitch-control error to 25.1-26.9 percentage points and a mean absolute control-share error of 11.1-13.4 points across the three matches. We then evaluate a ladder of training-free, online imputation baselines that use only observations from the match being analysed. The best overall on these decision-relevant metrics, role-anchored centroid voting (each visible player votes for the full-team centroid by subtracting its running role offset, attenuating the viewport-induced subset bias), roughly halves hidden-zone error (to 12.2-13.8 points) and cuts control-share error to 28-48% of the ignore policy at every viewport width from 36 m to 60 m in all three matches. For occlusions <=9.6 s -- the regime of the closest learned prior work -- it reaches binwise median position errors of 3.3-8.9 m; but 50-57% of hidden-player observations lie beyond that regime. Integrated end-to-end into a broadcast-video GSR pipeline, imputation moves a downstream possession-quality score (Space-Creation Index) by 15.6 and 17.2 points on two real World Cup broadcast windows, flipping the verdict class in one.

Seongjin Choi

Independent researcher.

Sports Video Analysis Sports Analytics Soccer Analytics

Jun 23, 2026

SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting: Per-Player Attention with Agreement-Based Ensembling

We present our submission to the SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball Action Spotting challenge, which uses a two-stage pipeline: a Track-Aware Action Detector (TAAD) produces per-player action logits from broadcast video, and a Denoising Sequence Transduction (DST) transformer converts game-state features and TAAD logits into structured event sequences. We improve the TAAD with a temporal transformer that adds cross-frame context, alongside several training fixes. For the DST stage, we introduce a two-stage per-player attention mechanism operating on game-state features, and show that a spatial-first attention ordering (cross-player attention before temporal attention) improves validation Macro-F1 by 1.87%. To exploit architectural diversity, we train four model variants and combine them with a Weighted Event Fusion ensemble that applies agreement filtering to suppress single-model false positives while preserving recall, plus a dedicated exception for the rare tackle class. Our final system improves the challenge Macro-F1 from a baseline of 48.6 to 58.94.

Faisal Altawijri, Ismail Mathkour

TAHAKOM

Sports Video Analysis Video Action Recognition Temporal Action Detection Time Series Transformers Soccer Analytics

Jun 18, 2026

Blame is easier than praise: Measuring off-ball defensive performance in football

The defensive performance of football players is commonly measured through a limited number of actions like tackles and interceptions while their continuous impact through positional behaviour has hardly been studied before. We formulate this problem as an attribution over multi-agent spatiotemporal trajectories without player-level ground truth labels, where event-level changes of expected threat are distributed among individuals. We propose a framework that performs this attribution using player involvement scores calculated from defensive pressure areas (DPAs). By computing role-conditioned baselines within automatically detected team structures, we can determine each defender's expected responsibility for threat created through arbitrary passes. The validity and robustness of this approach are evaluated on a uniquely extensive cross-gender and cross-competition data set, including positional and event data from 64 matches of the men's World Cup, 116 matches of the women's German Bundesliga and 336 matches of the men's German 3. Liga. In the absence of a ground truth, we propose an evaluation protocol that combines multiple relatively weak proxies into robust summary scores. We find a validity score that is improved by around 1 standard deviation compared to the best action-based metric and demonstrate that many popular measures show limited validity. The "blame" for conceding high-value actions shows especially strong correlations with external ratings and market values, making it the first published metric in football to reliably measure positioning errors. All code underlying this work is publicly available to support reproducibility and further research.

Jonas Bischofberger, Runqing Ma, Pascal Bauer +2

Centre for Sport Science and University Sports, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · Vienna Doctoral School of Pharmaceutical, Nutritional and Sport Sciences (VDS-PhaNuSpo), University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · VfB Stuttgart 1893 AG, Stuttgart, Germany +2

Automated Evaluation Fine-Grained Credit Assignment Soccer Analytics Sports Analytics

Jun 9, 2026

Monte Carlo Pass Search: Using Trajectory Generation for 3D Counterfactual Pass Evaluation in Football

We recast pass evaluation in football (soccer) as a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-like evaluation problem whose components mostly exist in the literature under different names: a value model (possession value), a world model (multi-agent trajectories with ball interactions), and a policy over counterfactual actions (sampling pass variants with noise). Building on the first public high-fidelity tracking dataset with 3D ball trajectories from the Bundesliga, we introduce Monte Carlo Pass Search (MCPS), which infers kick parameters for each observed pass, samples execution variants and option variants, rolls each candidate forward with a ball-conditioned world model until the next ball interaction, and scores outcomes with a learned value model to obtain a distribution over gained value. This distribution enables distribution-aware attribution with two complementary execution-surplus scores used for analysis and ranking: mean-based and percentile-based scores. To make the world model sample-efficient under limited public data, we adapt a discrete-token, autoregressive trajectory generator from autonomous driving (SMART) and show it yields strong best-of-20 forecasting accuracy compared to baselines, while supporting fully hypothetical rollouts for downstream evaluation. We have released model checkpoints and code.

Andrew Kang, Priya Narasimhan

Carnegie Mellon University · Pittsburgh, USA

Counterfactual Evaluation Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction Sports Video Analysis Monte Carlo Tree Search Soccer Analytics Sports Analytics

Jun 8, 2026

SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball-Action Spotting:Retraining and Post-Processing Extensions to the FOOTPASS Baselines

We describe our system for the SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball-Action Spotting Challenge, which requires predicting who performs which action and when, across eight classes in broadcast soccer. Building on the three FOOTPASS baselines [1] (TAAD, TAAD+GNN, and TAAD+DST), we contribute four extensions: (1) gradient check pointing to enable full-backbone fine-tuning on a single GPU; (2) fusion of GNN logits into the DST encoder, combining graph-based tactical context with per-player visual features; (3) square-root frequency class weighting to address the 213:1 pass-to-tackle imbalance in the training data; and (4) a post processing pipeline comprising per-class logit gating, temporal frame refinement, jersey re-assignment, and a two-model ensemble. Our system achieves 0.548 Macro F1 on the test set and 0.446 on the challenge set (server evaluation).

Parthsarthi Rawat

GameChanger by Dick’s Sporting Goods

Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics

Jun 8, 2026

Intention Driven Identification of In-Possession Match Phases in Association Football through Temporal Graph Learning

Understanding tactical organisation in association football requires identifying in-possession match phases that are shaped by evolving tactical intentions rather than by spatial patterns alone. This study proposes an intention-driven framework for identifying phases from tracking data. Seven German Bundesliga matches recorded at 25 Hz with TRACAB were analysed. A hierarchical model was defined with three tactical intentions (Invade Opponent Space, Keep Possession, Scoring) and six phases (Build Up, Progression, Counter Attack, Maintenance, Sustained Threat, Finishing). A Temporal Graph Attention Network (T-GAN) combined frame-level player-interaction graphs, contextual features, and Transformer-based temporal modelling. Performance was evaluated using frame-level F1 and temporal Intersection over Union (tIoU). T-GAN achieved macro-average frame-level F1 scores of 0.87 at the intention level, 0.76 for invasion-related phases, and 0.79 for scoring phases. After filtering, mean class-wise tIoU increased from 0.44 to 0.67 for intentions and from 0.40 to 0.57 for phases, showing that sequence-level evaluation captured fragmentation and boundary errors missed by frame-level metrics. Model comparisons indicated that Transformer-based sequence modelling drove coherent segmentation, while graph-based relational modelling was most beneficial for Counter Attack. Misalignment analysis revealed common sequence level misalignments, mainly Build Up/Progression ambiguity, Build Up/Maintenance confusion, Counter Attack/Progression inconsistency, and shortened pre-shot Finishing segments. Overall, the framework translates tracking data into tactically interpretable phase representations for automated annotation, tactical analysis, and playing-style profiling.

Yuesen Li, Daniel Link

Technical University of Munich, Experimental Exercise Science, Munich, Germany · Technical University of Munich, Munich Data Science Institute, Munich, Germany

Temporal Action Segmentation Temporal GNNs Sports Video Analysis Intent Classification Soccer Analytics

Jun 4, 2026

Maximising the Set-Piece Return: Optimising Football Corner Tactics with Graph Reinforcement Learning

Machine learning is increasingly employed for the evaluation of football tactics. However, existing approaches focus on characterising historical actions or analyst-specified counterfactual scenarios. In this work, we seek to go beyond the imitation of historically observed patterns towards discovering new generalisable player configurations and strategies. To tackle this, we focus on optimising corner kick routines, and formulate a decision-making problem in which a central policy makes adjustments to attacking player positions and velocities to maximise first contact shot probability. Unlike classic optimisation that solves for isolated setups, we contribute a reinforcement learning architecture operating on graph-structured data that yields a general policy for adjusting arbitrary starting player positions. Evaluated on over 3,000 Premier League corners, our approach strongly outperforms baseline optimisation techniques under matched inference budgets. Our results suggest that graph reinforcement learning can shift set-piece analysis from historical evaluation and imitation towards reward-driven tactical discovery.

Sean Groom, Michael Groom, Francisco Belo +4

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK · Nottingham Forest Football Club, Nottingham, UK · Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK +1

Reinforcement Learning Soccer Analytics

Apr 20, 2026

TacticGen: Grounding Adaptable and Scalable Generation of Football Tactics

Success in association football relies on both individual skill and coordinated tactics. While recent advancements in spatio-temporal data and deep learning have enabled predictive analyses like trajectory forecasting, the development of tactical design remains limited. Bridging this gap is essential, as prediction reveals what is likely to occur, whereas tactic generation determines what should occur to achieve strategic objectives. In this work, we present TacticGen, a generative model for adaptable and scalable tactic generation. TacticGen formulates tactics as sequences of multi-agent movements and interactions conditioned on the game context. It employs a multi-agent diffusion transformer with agent-wise self-attention and context-aware cross-attention to capture cooperative and competitive dynamics among players and the ball. Trained with over 3.3 million events and 100 million tracking frames from top-tier leagues, TacticGen achieves state-of-the-art precision in predicting player trajectories. Building on it, TacticGen enables adaptable tactic generation tailored to diverse inference-time objectives through classifier guidance mechanism, specified via rules, natural language, or neural models. Its modeling performance is also inherently scalable. A case study with football experts confirms that TacticGen generates realistic, strategically valuable tactics, demonstrating its practical utility for tactical planning in professional football. The project page is available at: https://shengxu.net/TacticGen/.

Sheng Xu, Guiliang Liu, Tarak Kharrat +12

School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China · Real Analytics, London, UK · Birmingham City Football Club, Birmingham, UK +3

Conditional Generative Modeling Soccer Analytics

Apr 17, 2026

MambaKick: Early Penalty Direction Prediction from HAR Embeddings

Penalty kicks in soccer are decided under extreme time constraints, where goalkeepers benefit from anticipating shot direction from the kickers motion before or around ball contact. In this paper, MambaKick is presented as a learning-based framework for penalty direction prediction that leverages pretrained human action recognition (HAR) embeddings extracted from contact-centered short video segments and combines them with a lightweight temporal predictor. Rather than relying on explicit kinematic reconstruction or handcrafted biomechanical features, the approach reuses transferable spatiotemporal representations and utilizes selective state-spare models (Mamba) for efficient sequence aggregation. Simple contextual metadata (e.g., field side and footedness) are also considered as complementary cues that may reduce ambiguity in real-world footage. Across a range of HAR backbones, MambaKick consistently improves or matches strong embedding baselines, achieving up to 53.1% accuracy for three classes and 64.5% for two classes under the proposed methodology. Overall, the results indicate that combining pretrained HAR representations with efficient state-space temporal modeling is a practical direction for low-latency intention prediction in real-world sports video. The code will be available at GitHub: https://github.com/hvelesaca/MambaKick/

Henry O. Velesaca, David Freire-Obregon, Abel Reyes-Angulo +2

ESPOL Polytechnic University, ESPOL, Campus Gustavo Galindo, Km. 30.5 Vía Perimetral, Guayaquil, 090902, Ecuador · Software Engineering Department, Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC-UGR), University of Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain · SIANI, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain +2

Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics

Apr 13, 2026

GenTac: Generative Modeling and Forecasting of Soccer Tactics

Modeling open-play soccer tactics is a formidable challenge due to the stochastic, multi-agent nature of the game. Existing computational approaches typically produce single, deterministic trajectory forecasts or focus on highly structured set-pieces, fundamentally failing to capture the inherent variance and branching possibilities of real-world match evolution. Here, we introduce GenTac, a diffusion-based generative framework that conceptualizes soccer tactics as a stochastic process over continuous multi-player trajectories and discrete semantic events. By learning the underlying distribution of player movements from historical tracking data, GenTac samples diverse, plausible, long-horizon future trajectories. The framework supports rich contextual conditioning, including opponent behavior, specific team or league playing styles, and strategic objectives, while grounding continuous spatial dynamics into a 15-class tactical event space. Extensive evaluations on our proposed benchmark, TacBench, demonstrate four key capabilities: (1) GenTac achieves high geometric accuracy while strictly preserving the collective structural consistency of the team; (2) it accurately simulates stylistic nuances, distinguishing between specific teams (e.g., Auckland FC) and leagues (e.g., A-League versus German leagues); (3) it enables controllable counterfactual simulations, demonstrably altering spatial control and expected threat metrics based on offensive or defensive guidance; and (4) it reliably anticipates future tactical outcomes directly from generated rollouts. Finally, we demonstrate that GenTac can be successfully trained to generalize to other dynamic team sports, including basketball, American football, and ice hockey.

Jiayuan Rao, Tianlin Gui, Haoning Wu +2

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

Soccer Analytics Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction Diffusion Models for Motion Generation

Apr 9, 2026

AI Driven Soccer Analysis Using Computer Vision

Sport analysis is crucial for team performance since it provides actionable data that can inform coaching decisions, improve player performance, and enhance team strategies. To analyze more complex features from game footage, a computer vision model can be used to identify and track key entities from the field. We propose the use of an object detection and tracking system to predict player positioning throughout the game. To translate this to positioning in relation to the field dimensions, we use a point prediction model to identify key points on the field and combine these with known field dimensions to extract actual distances. For the player-identification model, object detection models like YOLO and Faster R-CNN are evaluated on the accuracy of our custom video footage using multiple different evaluation metrics. The goal is to identify the best model for object identification to obtain the most accurate results when paired with SAM2 (Segment Anything Model 2) for segmentation and tracking. For the key point detection model, we use a CNN model to find consistent locations in the soccer field. Through homography, the positions of points and objects in the camera perspective will be transformed to a real-ground perspective. The segmented player masks from SAM2 are transformed from camera perspective to real-world field coordinates through homography, regardless of camera angle or movement. The transformed real-world coordinates can be used to calculate valuable tactical insights including player speed, distance covered, positioning heatmaps, and more complex team statistics, providing coaches and players with actionable performance data previously unavailable from standard video analysis.

Adrian Manchado, Tanner Cellio, Jonathan Keane +1

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee, WI 53202

Soccer Analytics Sports Video Analysis Visual Object Tracking Object Detection

Apr 7, 2026

Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videos

Fatigue monitoring is central in association football due to its links with injury risk and tactical performance. However, objective fatigue-related indicators are commonly derived from subjective self-reported metrics, biomarkers derived from laboratory tests, or, more recently, intrusive sensors such as heart monitors or GPS tracking data. This paper studies whether monocular broadcast videos can provide spatio-temporal signals of sufficient quality to support fatigue-oriented analysis. Building on state-of-the-art Game State Reconstruction methods, we extract player trajectories in pitch coordinates and propose a novel kinematics processing algorithm to obtain temporally consistent speed and acceleration estimates from reconstructed tracks. We then construct acceleration--speed (A-S) profiles from these signals and analyze their behavior as fatigue-related performance indicators. We evaluate the full pipeline on the public SoccerNet-GSR benchmark, considering both 30-second clips and a complete 45-minute half to examine short-term reliability and longer-term temporal consistency. Our results indicate that monocular GSR can recover kinematic patterns that are compatible with A-S profiling while also revealing sensitivity to trajectory noise, calibration errors, and temporal discontinuities inherent to broadcast footage. These findings support monocular broadcast video as a low-cost basis for fatigue analysis and delineate the methodological challenges for future research.

Xavier Bou, Nathan Correger, Alexandre Cloots +7

Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, ENS Paris-Saclay · AMIAD, Pôle Recherche · University of Liège +3

Sports Analytics Soccer Analytics Sports Video Analysis

Mar 30, 2026

Structural Pass Analysis in Football: Learning Pass Archetypes and Tactical Impact from Spatio-Temporal Tracking Data

Passing actions are commonly evaluated through ball progression and attacking outcomes, yet their relationship with the spatial organisation of the opposition provides an additional perspective on passing behaviour. This study introduces an interpretable framework for describing passing structure using synchronised event and tracking data. Three complementary descriptors are proposed: Line Bypass Score (LBS), measuring the difference in goal-side opponent counts between passer and receiver; Space Gain Metric (SGM), comparing their nearest-opponent distances; and Structural Disruption Index (SDI), summarising differences in defensive organisation between pass initiation and a sampled state one second later. Following transformation and standardisation, these descriptors are combined into Tactical Impact Value (TIV), a fixed-weight structural composite. Applied to 41,078 open-play passing events from the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the framework identifies four interpretable profiles: Circulatory, Destabilising, Line-breaking, and Space-expanding. The profiles exhibit distinct structural signatures and different distributions of territorial-crossing and recorded attacking indicators. Team, spatial, player, and passer--receiver analyses further demonstrate how the representation can describe passing behaviour across analytical scales. The framework complements outcome-oriented approaches by connecting individual passing actions with measurable characteristics of opposition positioning and defensive organisation.

Oktay Karakuş, Hasan Arkadaş, Can Eyüpoğlu

Cardiff University, School of Computer Science and Informatics, Abacws, Senghennydd Road, Cardiff, CF24 4AG, UK · Dead Ball Analytics Limited, Barry, CF63 2QQ, UK

Soccer Analytics

Mar 18, 2026

Objective Mispricing Detection for Shortlisting Undervalued Football Players via Market Dynamics and News Signals

We present a practical, reproducible framework for identifying undervalued football players grounded in objective mispricing. Instead of relying on subjective expert labels, we estimate an expected market value from structured data (historical market dynamics, biographical and contract features, transfer history) and compare it to the observed valuation to define mispricing. We then assess whether news-derived Natural Language Processing (NLP) features (i.e., sentiment statistics and semantic embeddings from football articles) complement market signals for shortlisting undervalued players. Using a chronological (leakage-aware) evaluation, gradient-boosted regression explains a large share of the variance in log-transformed market value. For undervaluation shortlisting, ROC-AUC-based ablations show that market dynamics are the primary signal, while NLP features provide consistent, secondary gains that improve robustness and interpretability. SHAP analyses suggest the dominance of market trends and age, with news-derived volatility cues amplifying signals in high-uncertainty regimes. The proposed pipeline is designed for decision support in scouting workflows, emphasizing ranking/shortlisting over hard classification thresholds, and includes a concise reproducibility and ethics statement.

Chinenye Omejieke, Shuyao Chen, Xia Cui

School of Computing and Mathematics, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom · Typewind Ltd., London, United Kingdom

Sports Analytics Soccer Analytics

Feb 19, 2026

Wide Open Gazes: Quantifying Visual Exploratory Behavior in Soccer with Pose Enhanced Positional Data

Traditional approaches to measuring visual exploratory behavior in soccer rely on counting visual exploratory actions (VEAs) based on rapid head movements exceeding 125°/s, but this method suffer from player position bias (i.e., a focus on central midfielders), annotation challenges, binary measurement constraints (i.e., a player is scanning, or not), lack the power to predict relevant short-term in-game future success, and are incompatible with fundamental soccer analytics models such as pitch control. This research introduces a novel formulaic continuous stochastic vision layer to quantify players' visual perception from pose-enhanced spatiotemporal tracking. Our probabilistic field-of-view and occlusion models incorporate head and shoulder rotation angles to create speed-dependent vision maps for individual players in a two-dimensional top-down plane. We combine these vision maps with pitch control and pitch value surfaces to analyze the awaiting phase (when a player is awaiting the ball to arrive after a pass for a teammate) and their subsequent on-ball phase. We demonstrate that aggregated visual metrics - such as the percentage of defended area observed while awaiting a pass - are predictive of controlled pitch value gained at the end of dribbling actions using 32 games of synchronized pose-enhanced tracking data and on-ball event data from the 2024 Copa America. This methodology works regardless of player position, eliminates manual annotation requirements, and provides continuous measurements that seamlessly integrate into existing soccer analytics frameworks. To further support the integration with existing soccer analytics frameworks we open-source the tools required to make these calculations.

Joris Bekkers

U.S. Soccer Federation, Atlanta, USA · UnravelSports, Breda, Netherlands

Soccer Analytics Sports Analytics Gaze Estimation Sports Video Analysis

Feb 17, 2026

A Computer Vision Framework for Multi-Class Detection and Tracking in Soccer Broadcast Footage

Clubs with access to expensive multi-camera setups or GPS tracking systems gain a competitive advantage through detailed data, whereas lower-budget teams are often unable to collect similar information. This paper examines whether such data can instead be extracted directly from standard broadcast footage using a single-camera computer vision pipeline. This project develops an end-to-end system that combines a YOLO object detector with the ByteTrack tracking algorithm to identify and track players, referees, goalkeepers, and the ball throughout a match. Experimental results show that the pipeline achieves high performance in detecting and tracking players and officials, with strong precision, recall, and mAP50 scores, while ball detection remains the primary challenge. Despite this limitation, our findings demonstrate that AI can extract meaningful player-level spatial information from a single broadcast camera. By reducing reliance on specialized hardware, the proposed approach enables colleges, academies, and amateur clubs to adopt scalable, data-driven analysis methods previously accessible only to professional teams, highlighting the potential for affordable computer vision-based soccer analytics.

Daniel Tshiani

Sports Video Analysis Soccer Analytics Multi-Object Tracking Video Object Detection

Aug 3, 2025

SoccerTrack v2: A Full-Pitch Panoramic Video Dataset for Game State Reconstruction and Ball Action Spotting

Soccer analytics draws on two kinds of information: spatio-temporal data describing where players and the ball are, and event data describing what they do. Public datasets offer them apart, or together only on broadcast footage that leaves players outside the frame unobserved. SoccerTrack v2 combines continuous full-pitch video, long player trajectories and actor-linked events in one resource: ten university-level matches, 932 minutes of fixed-camera 4K panoramic video, annotated per frame with metric pitch coordinates, jersey numbers and persistent identities, roles and team sides for all players, and with ball action events in twelve classes, linked to the acting players through the same identifiers used in the trajectories. We fix a match-level split and report baselines for two tasks. For game state reconstruction, we run a full pipeline over all twenty halves and find that GS-HOTA scores degrade as sequence length increases. For ball action spotting, we train a model on the player trajectories, with and without the ball track. The data, the split and the evaluation tooling are released so that both tasks can be developed and compared at match length on the same footage.

Atom Scott, Ikuma Uchida, Kento Kuroda +2

Nagoya University∗ · University of Tsukuba

Sports Video Analysis Multi-Object Tracking Sports Analytics Soccer Analytics