Study of Successful Teams on FIFA World Cup 2010 through Notational Analysis

A notational analysis provides opportunities to analyze the intrinsic characteristics of the teams in order to improve the quality of the training and quality of the opponent’s observation. The main objective of this work was to analyze the performance parameters and characterize the most successful teams on FIFA World Cup 2010, in order to describe the most relevant parameters that can improve the efficacy of the teams. Analyzes of variance among groups of teams were made in order to characterize the performance parameters and find differences that can explain the efficacy of the teams on competition. Regarding to results of this work is possible to verify that the most successful teams on attacking phase used more times the external side of the pitch. In the same way, the most successful teams take advantage to the penalty area of the opponent to make more shots and increase the opportunity to score. Concerning to passes made by teams, the most successful teams shows the tendency to make more short and medium passes than long passes, and shows more efficacy on the quality of the passes. The results demonstrate that most successful teams confirm some parameters that characterize the efficacy of the teams in line with the literature. Parameters as passes completed, areas of the shots made, attacking zones or zones of goals suffered are indicators that characterize the efficacy of the most successful teams on FIFA World Cup 2010. Key words: Match analysis, team performance, soccer, offensive indicators, defensive indicators .