It’s a privilege to once again host the Research Track stage at the Hudl 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 Friday, 11th October.
This year, we asked for papers that followed the theme: Trade Off's. As with much of life, football involves many trade-offs. How much time should I spend coaching defence instead of attack in training this week? Should we spend our remaining budget on a young 3rd choice winger or use it to offer a current player a new deal? We looked for proposals where research is grounded in the difficult decisions coaches, analysts and executives make at clubs every day, and drew insights from them using Hudl 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 Hudl 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:
Akedjou Achraff Adjileye - RisingBALLER:A Player is a Token, a Match is a Sentence–A Path Towards a Foundational Model for Football Players Data Analytics
Lorenzo Cascioli et al - Boot It: A Pragmatic Alternative To Build Up Play
Michael Gleeson - Modelling Team Play Style Using Tracking Data to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Variance in Tactical Behaviour
Mark Carter - Footedness: How important is it?
Edoardo Ghezzi and Hadi Sotudeh - Match Phases in Practice
