The 2022 Qatar Football World Cup promised to be revolutionary from the point of view of analyzing and visualizing match data, and it delivered. What role does data play in what has been called “the new language of football”? How are odds and chance influencing key game situations, such as penalties?
Data science is increasingly immersed in high-performance sports, through technologies that allow situations and events to be recorded, both on the field of play and during training: cameras in stadiums and on television, and fitness trackers style sensors (watches or belts) that players wear to measure speed, breathing, heart activity and even the risk of injury. In turn, large soccer teams began to use so-called “tactical cameras”, which film each of the players throughout the game. The data began to be analyzed in 2D, but then it was switched to 3D, with computer-assisted vision becoming very important.
During the 2022 Qatar World Cup, fans have an unprecedented amount of statistics on social media. At the same time, FIFA - through its group of experts in football data - has already tested a series of data analysis tools grouped under the term Enhanced Football Intelligence (EFI). These metrics were already tested in real time during the Australia-Peru and Costa Rica-New Zealand repechage games. So much so, that FIFA’s quest is to give life to what they call “The New Language of Football”, developed and built by the game’s metrics.
In the same game, up to about 8 million pieces of data can be captured, information that is not visualized with the naked eye (since it is said that the human eye is only capable of retaining about a third of what happens during the game). Qatar, then, inaugurates a new era for data capture in football: if an average of 2,000 to 2,500 events are recorded in a match, this World Cup reaches 15,000 data points per game.
FIFA is working at great speed, since the objective is to move towards capturing data on a large scale during matches and strengthening algorithms so that they can deliver insights that add value. Each game offers different levels of data for broadcasters and media, coaching staff and fans. Some of these metrics correspond to subsequent analysis of the games, but others can be known almost in real time.
How can you produce metrics just 30 seconds after the action? EFI metrics are designed to enrich live tracking data flows, passes, plays or situations that occurred during the match. The information, which takes just two seconds on average to process, is sent in real time by external providers directly to the FIFA database. Numerical models receive this information, which is integrated into the algorithms that calculate the results. These are forwarded to the FIFA data center, which in turn distributes the EFI rich metrics to all parties involved within 30 seconds of the event in question. In strict live format, spectators and interested parties are provided with new data such as line breaks, pressure on the ball or the stages of the game. These are measurements that explain the style of play of each team or have a correlation with the final result of each match.
Another important innovation of this World Cup is that at the time of the final all players can search for their performance data in an app specially designed and developed by the governing body, which allows players from all 32 teams to access analysis and detailed information. The data is synchronized with the video of the match actions to allow a quick evaluation of key moments. The application uses input from FIFA performance analysts, tracking data and physical performance metrics, such as distance traveled, sprints and positional heat maps. As if that wasn’t enough, players also receive photographs of the matches, which they can share on social networks along with statistics and data.
Towards match predictions
Can data science or statistics help predict which team will win each game and which team is most likely to win this World Cup?
As Walter Sosa Escudero, a leading Argentine researcher in statistics, econometrics and data science, recently pointed out, it is not possible to predict who will win the World Cup.
This is due to the enormous complexity of competitive sports, which involves a large dose of strategic behavior, in which what a team or player does is also determined by what their rival does or believes they will do. In this sense, Spanish academic Ignacio Palacios Huerta studied the performance of a large number of professional goalkeepers and strikers, and concluded that it is virtually impossible to predict what will happen in a penalty shootout: goalkeepers and professional players kick with a heavy dose of chance, so that no one gains anything from spending hours watching YouTube videos about penalties, trying to guess the supposed strategies. And if it’s impossible to predict penalties, a similar logic applies to soccer games.
Even so, some researchers study the probability of winning each team based on historical data (all the games played in all international competitions) and mathematical calculations (simulated).
An example of this is the World Cup Bot (@ElBotDelMundial), a tool developed by the Institute of Calculus (UBA-CONICET) and available on Twitter, based on a mathematical model that predicts the probability of winning of the teams that face each other in each match of the World Cup and evaluates the chances of becoming champion of all the national teams. It should be noted that the simulator takes into account the results of the games already played, and this will be reflected in the calculations obtained as the World Cup goes on. The entire tournament is simulated a million times, to prevent random factors from affecting the results and then ensure that the values obtained are similar to the real ones.
In short, Qatar will be a unique and unprecedented opportunity for those who enjoy playing with data analysis, visualizations, chance and probability of match results.
This article was originally published on infobae.com
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