Visual analytics of soccer player performance using objective ratings

Abstract

The performance of soccer players is commonly rated by soccer experts for each match as well as over a tournament or during a season/year. However, these ratings are mostly subjective. We instead propose a visual analytics approach for a more objective, data-driven analysis of soccer players’ performances. We introduce data-driven ratings for various aspects, which can be combined by interactively assigning weights to compute an overall score as well as individual scores for passes, duels, and shots. Our tool supports comparative visualizations at a global level that can be adapted to different analysis tasks as well as in-detail analyses of individual events of the game. We apply our approach to data gathered during the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship and perform in-detail analyses of individual players in selected matches.