A team of researchers from Northwestern University has inventeda mathematical algorithm that allows evaluating the professionalism and quality of play of a soccer teamregardless of football statistics.
The study, published in the journalPlos One, highlights that football, unlike baseball, basketball or hockey, has a “very poor” statistic of quality of play, which is reduced to the names of the one who scored the goal and the one who passed the ball to him in a game concrete. To remedy this, the project director, the Portuguese Luis Amaral, and his colleagues at Northwestern proposed anew technique to evaluate the gameof a soccer team thattakes into account the contribution of each player to the final result, as well as the complex interactions between them.
Using this technique, the researchers developeda software that allows you to register successful passes, as well asthe combinations of passes that end with a shot on goalregardless of whether your score is a goal or not. “A goal is not only a matter of technique, but also of luck,” explained Amaral, while clarifying that, as a final result,the program calculates the level of professionalism of both the entire team and each of its players.
Analyzing in this way the matches of the 2008 European Cup, the scientists developed a classification of the teams that coincided with the result of the tournament. Amaral now wants to use his algorithm to evaluate the performance of the national teams in the Soccer World Cup that is taking place these days in South Africa.
The algorithm developedIt also allows us to analyze teamwork in other areas, such as research, artistic creativity or business activity..
