Detection of individual ball possession in soccer

Abstract

While ball possession usually is considered on team level, a model on player level brings several advantages. We calculate ball possession and control statistics for all players as well as new ball control heat maps to evaluate the players’ performances. Furthermore, a basis for detecting events and tactical structure becomes available. To derive individual ball possession from spatio-temporal data, we present an automatic approach, based both on physical knowledge and machine learning techniques. Moreover, we introduce different ball possession definitions and algorithms to model various grades of ball control. When applied to flawless raw data, the algorithms show precision and recall ratios between 80 and 92%. With approximately four percentage points less in uncorrected data, the presented algorithms are also reliable in real-world scenarios.