Toward Better Understanding of Dynamic Soccer Passing Networks

Recent studies have confirmed that analysis of passing networks of soccer can provide insights for un-derstanding teams’attacking strategies.However,most of the existing works regarded passing networks as static networks,failing to investigate the change of strategies and time-varying passing patterns.To address the prob-lem,important tasks from interviews with domain experts are identified and an interactive visual analytics system is developed to support comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of passing networks.A glyph-based design ac-companied with projection techniques is proposed to visualize the dynamic change in network topologies,the as-sociated spatial context,and the network characteristics.With the system,users can detect the changing pattern of passes and analyze the relationship between passes and spatial regions.For evaluation,expert interviews are conducted to demonstrate the usability of the system in analyzing the dynamics of passing networks.