It’s a privilege to once again host the Research Track stage at the StatsBomb Conference, with the winners of our research paper competition presenting their work to an audience of industry experts and professionals. We’re delighted to be able to release the research papers from the successful participants today, ahead of the event on Tuesday, 10th October.
This year, we asked for papers that followed the theme: Identifying Team Tactical Style of Play. When discussing and quantifying team performance, a key aspect is their tactical and stylistic approach. We looked for proposals that identified aspects of a team's approach and drew insights from them using StatsBomb’s base and 360 data.
We had dozens of submissions, and the proposals were to a very high standard once again. But, we could only select a handful to conduct their research and present their findings at the event: the presentations you’ll watch and the papers you’ll read below were from the submissions we found to be the most compelling, practical, and applicable. All research has been performed on a dataset of StatsBomb event and 360 data from a select subset of leagues of the researcher’s choosing.
All of the talks from the research competition winners will be made available to watch on YouTube after the event.
You can access the research papers by following the links below, or if you want to attend the Conference in person, you can purchase tickets by clicking here.
Ahmed El-Roby, et al - StratAlign: Uncovering Tactical Patterns through Large-Scale Event Sequence Matching
Calvin Yeung and Rory Bunker - An Events and 360 Data-Driven Approach for Extracting Team Tactics and Evaluating Performance in Football
Deniz Can Oruç, et al - An Analysis of the Influence of Game Context on Team Playing Style
Maia Trower, Niamh Graham et al- Clustering Women's Football Players - Identifying Functional Patterns for Performance Optimisation
Marc Garnica Caparrós - Leveraging Team Traces to Optimise Process-Aware Tactical Style Discovery
Matthew Caron & Oliver Müller - TacticalGPT - Uncovering the Potential of LLMs for Predicting Tactical Decisions in Professional Football
Oliver Craven - Measuring Player Performance Through Predicting Team Actions
Praful Upadhyay & Janik Backhaus - Identifying Key Players & Playing Styles of 10 English Premier League Teams During Offensive Sequences in 2021-2022 Season
Rikuhei Umemoto & Keisuke Fujii - Evaluation of Team Defense Positioning by Computing Counterfactuals Using StatsBomb 360 Data
Zitian Tang, et al - Clustering Football Game Situations via Deep Representation Learning
Tickets to the 2023 StatsBomb Conference will be available to buy until 12pm on Friday 6th October.
