Performance analysis in soccer: a Cartesian coordinates based approach using RoboCup data

In soccer, like in business, results are often the best indicator of a team’s performance in a certain competition but insufficient to a coach to asses his team performance. As a consequence, measurement tools play an important role in this particular field. In this research work, a performance tool for soccer, based only in Cartesian coordinates is presented. Capable of calculating final game statistics, suisber of shots, the calculus methodology analyzes the game in a sequential manner, starting with the identification of the kick event (the basis for detecting all events), which is related with a positive variation in the ball’s velocity vector. The achieved results were quite satisfactory, mainly due to the number of successfully detected events in the validation process (based on manual annotation). For the majority of the statistics, these values are above 92% and only in the case of shots do these values drop to numbers between 74 and 85%. In the future, this methodology could be improved, especially regarding the shot statistics, integrated with a real-time localization system, or expanded for other collective sports games, such as hockey or basketball.