Illustrating changes in landscapes of passing opportunities along a set of competitive football matches

This study aims to illustrate the landscape of passing opportunities of a football team across a set of competitive matches. To do so positional data of 5 competitive matches was used to create polygons of pass availability. Passes were divided into three types depending on the hypothetical threat they may pose to the opposing defense (penetrative, support, and backwards passes). These categories were used to create three heatmaps per match. Moreover, the mean time of passing opportunities was calculated and compared across matches and for the three categories of passes. Due to the specificity of player’s interactive behavior, results showed heatmaps with a variety of patterns. Specifically the fifth match was very dissimilar to the other four. However, characterizing a football match in terms of passing opportunities with a single heatmap dismisses the variety of dynamics that occur throughout a match. Therefore, three temporal heatmaps over windows of 10 min were presented highlighting on-going dynamical changes in pass availability. Results also display that penetrative passes were available over shorter periods of time than backward passes that were available shorter than support passes. The results highlight the sensibility of the model to different task constrains that emerge within football matches.Tis work was supported by the PhD grant SFRH/BD/135876/2018 confer by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) of the Portuguese government. Pedro Passos was partly supported by FCT, under Grant UIDB/00447/2020 to CIPER—Centro Interdisciplinar para o Estudo da Performance Humana (unit 447). Rodrigo Amaro e Silva was partly supported by project UIDB/50019/2020—IDL- Instituto Dom Luiz.Te data used in this study was kindly provided by the Barça Innovation Hub