The part that I really enjoy when it comes to an analytics project is bringing the stakeholders closer to data. Reason for that is that data visualization is in most cases the intersection between an analyst and a business expert. This intersection leads to the right questions, therefore to the analysis that needs to be made in each case.
If you are fascinated by football and you are also interested in data analytics and visualizations you may have already wondered how you can use R when it comes to sports and football in particular.
Unfortunately, there are limited available data sources publicly available. One of these is the datasets used for the following paper:
"Soccer video and player position dataset": S. A. Pettersen, D. Johansen, H. Johansen, V. Berg-Johansen, V. R. Gaddam, A. Mortensen, R. Langseth, C. Griwodz, H. K. Stensland, and P. Halvorsen, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia Systems (MMSys), Singapore, March 2014, pp. 18-23
Among the available datasets the first half of Tromsø IL against Strømsgodset was used (find link with details in the end of the post). The dataset is captured at Alfheim Stadium (home arena for Tromsø IL | Norway). We have XY coordinates for each player only for the home team, each one identified with an ID.
We will reproduce the movement of the players for the first half, which could be of use for a coach and the players.
We will need a football pitch:
Alright, now we have a pitch we will load & tranform the data.
Metrics like energy, speed and distance travelled could be of use for a match perfomance overview.
Let's focus on players' movement second after second:
Once again R shows its flexibility to process and visualize data in a meaningfull way. Now the coach and the players can review if the movement behavior was as expected or not and decide on improvement or patterns that should be analyzed.
Of course, in this case there are limitations since we do not get the ball movement or the opposite team's movement data, I welcome any information for publicly accessible data.
Info on Data
Link: http://home.ifi.uio.no/paalh/dataset/alfheim/
Data set used: 2013-11-03: Tromsø IL - Strømsgodset | ZXY data raw (20Hz) | First Half