Decoding and demystifying football

Research in Focus

Research in Focus: Predicting attacking movement, inspired by Paco Seirul·lo

Francisco Peralta Alguacil, Javier Fernández, Pablo Piñones Arce, David Sumpter, 'Seeing in to the future: using self-propelled particle models to aid player decision-making in soccer' [Presented at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - link to the paper here] Why it's worth your time Firstly,

Research in Focus: Ghosting

Hoang M. Le, Peter Carr, Yisong Yue, Patrick Lucey, 'Data-driven Ghosting using Deep Imitation Learning' [Presented at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (link) and in a slightly different form at the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (link)] Why it's worth your time '

Research in Focus: Deep reinforcement learning decision-making

Pegah Rahimian, Jan Van Haaren, Togzhan Abzhanova, Laszlo Toka, 'Beyond action valuation: A deep reinforcement learning framework for optimizing player decisions in soccer' [Presented at the 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (link)] Why it's worth your time Research into decision-making is always interesting, and is

Research in Focus: Karun Singh's Expected Threat

[Link here] Why it's worth your time There are precious few pieces of work that have both an immediate and a long-lasting impact like this one. People still talk about Expected Threat, and the blog is still linked to by others, from The Athletic to academic research papers.