Comparison of individual playing styles in football

What is it about?

This paper attempts to identify football players who have a similar style to a player of interest. Playing style is not adequately quantified with traditional statistics, and therefore style statistics are created using tracking data. Tracking data allow us to monitor players throughout a match, and therefore include both “on-the-ball” and “off-the-ball” observations. Having developed style features, tractable discrepancy measures are introduced that are based on Kullback–Leibler divergence in the context of multivariate normal distributions. Examples are provided where a pool of players from the Chinese Super League are identified as having a playing style that is similar to players of interest.

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Why is it important?

Our methods provide a data-driven and objective approach for the stylistic comparison of football players. With scouting, comparisons are typically subjective. With the increasing availability of tracking data, our methods may result in significant time savings when searching the universe of football players.