Mathematicians Javier López Peña from University College London and Hugo Touchette of Queen Mary, University of London have posted a paper that uses network theory to analyze soccer strategies. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that the pair treat the players on a team as nodes in a network, which is the same way that Facebook thinks of its users, and they also use an algorithm that Google utilizes:
Taking a page from Google, for example, the two mathematicians use a PageRank algorithm to evaluate players’ “popularity.” Whereas Google uses the algorithm to determine how often Web pages link to each other, Lopez and Touchette use it as a measure of how often a player has the ball passed to him by teammates.
The mathematicians also looked at factors including “betweenness” (how central a player is to the passing network of a team), “clustering” (how many ways the ball can travel from one player to another), and “maximal clique” (how many players passed the ball directly to each other).
By mathematically measuring teamwork, López and Touchette found that Spain boasted the highest number of passes per game, the best scores for clustering, and the biggest clique. So, according to network theory, the Spanish team are successful because they share the ball well and often, and they are better connected with each other.
via PSFK: here
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar