How to address locations on a football pitch

What is it about?

To adjust to local conditions, football pitches may vary in size, but the dimensions of penalty areas and other field markings are fixed. A new coordinate system with two origins, one in each goal, is proposed. It helps avoid problems with distortion and interpretation of locations that are inevitable with current systems, because they place a single origin in either a corner or the center of the field of play.

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Photo by John O'Nolan on Unsplash

Photo by John O'Nolan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Analytics in football and other invasion sports such as hockey and basketball make extensive use of spatial data. Software libraries to process such data must represent locations in a way that allows for comparison across matches. Efforts to collect spatial data with higher accuracy and precision are foiled, if this representation introduces new distortions. A goal-aligned coordinate system may therefore offer improvements at the basis of tools used in performance analysis and media coverage.