A motivating example: Investigating a football game

In this tutorial, we will explore a motivating example of visual analytics in football. We will use the StatsBomb Open Data to investigate a football game. The StatsBomb Open Data provides detailed event data for football games.

Data

The available data is organized into the following categories:

• Competitions
• Matches
• Events
• Lineups
• ThreeSixty

Competitions

The competitions data provides information about the competitions, such as name, gender, and season.

Matches

The matches data provides information about the matches, such as the home team, away team, scores, and match date.

Some attributes such as competition include Object values. We can display the data in a table format.

Events

The events data provides detailed information about the events that occur during a match, such as possession team, player, and location.

Lineups

lineups[0] ()

lineups[1] ()

ThreeSixty

The ThreeSixty data (StatsBomb 360) provides information about players' locations of the events.

Each event is associated to a ThreeSixty data (if available). A ThreeSixty data includes the following attributes:

• event_uuid: unique identifier of the event
• visible_area: area where players are visible
• freeze_frame: list of players' locations

Although the ThreeSixty data provides detailed information about the players' locations, it is difficult to interpret the data. We can use a different visualization to better understand the data.

The "actor" (who possesses the ball) is highlighted with a dashed ring. Their teammates are colored in red, while the opponents are colored in blue.