Statistics of football dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of football matches. Our goal is to characterize statistically the temporal sequence of ball movements in this collective sport game, searching for traits of complex behavior. Data were collected over a variety of matches in South American, European and World championships throughout 2005 and 2006. We show that the statistics of ball touches presents power-law tails and can be described by $q$-gamma distributions. To explain such behavior we propose a model that provides information on the characteristics of football dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss the statistics of duration of out-of-play intervals, not directly related to the previous scenario.

7 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Superstatistics
• From time series to superstatistics
• Complex network study of Brazilian soccer players
• On the distribution of high-frequency stock market traded volume: a dynamical scenario
• Regularities in football goal distributions

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Soccer: is scoring goals a predictable Poissonian process?
• Statistical properties of position-dependent ball-passing networks in football games
• Dynamics of tournaments: the soccer case
• Emergence of self-similarity in football dynamics
• Stochastic model for football's collective dynamics
• Statistical mixing and aggregation in Feller diffusion
• Theory and data analysis of player and team ball possession time in football
• Degree distribution of position-dependent ball-passing networks in football games
• Statistical properties for directional alignment and chasing of players in football games
• Nash equilibrium in a stochastic model of two competing athletes
• Random diffusivity scenarios behind anomalous non-Gaussian diffusion