The Attacking Process in Football: A Taxonomy for Classifying How Teams Create Goal Scoring Opportunities Using a Case Study of Crystal Palace FC

Abstract

PurposeWhilst some studies have comprehensively described the different features associated with the attacking process in football they have not produced a methodology of practical use for performance enhancement. This study presents a framework of comprehensive and meaningful metrics to objectively describe the attacking process so that useful performance profiles can be produced.MethodsThe attacking process was categorized into three independent situations, no advantage (stable), advantage, and unstable (potential goal scoring opportunity) situations. Operational definitions for each situation enhanced their reliability and validity. English Premier League football matches (n = 38) played by Crystal Palace Football Club in the 2017/2018 season were analyzed as an exemplar.ResultsCrystal Palace FC created a median of 53.5 advantage situations (IQR = 16.8) and 23 unstable situations (IQR = 8.8) per match. They frequently utilized wide areas (Median = 21.5, IQR = 9.8) to progress, but only 26.6% resulted in unstable situations (Median = 6.0, IQR = 3.8), the lowest rate compared to the other advantage situations.ConclusionThis classification framework, when used with contextual factors in a multi-factorial manner, including individual player contributions, will provide practically useful information for applied practice. This approach will help close the so called theory-practice gap and enable academic rigor to inform practical problems.

Analysis of football research trends using text network analysis

“…Recently, research on adult competitiveness involving elite players is becoming more common. Research on performance mainly involves physical [ 7 ], technical [ 2 ], or tactical [ 5 ] performance. Unlike previous laboratory experiments, recent research has been conducted using field measurements mainly acquired from professional football leagues (e.g., EPL, La Liga, Bundesliga) and international competitions (e.g., World Cup, Europa League, Olympics).…”

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Analyzing Passing Sequences for the Prediction of Goal-Scoring Opportunities

“…Once the goal-scoring opportunity sequences have been extracted, the next step is to see what areas of the pitch the ball passes through during these sequences. Different ways of partitioning the pitch have been proposed [7,19] and any of them could be used here. For this work, we decided to use a similar method to the one proposed in [16] because it includes the "half spaces" that are of particular interest to football coaches.…”

League 3 of Indonesia Bali Zone: Shots and patterns of scoring a goal

“…Starting from analyzing the team's performance in scoring goals during the 1990 to 1998 World Cups (Hughes & Franks, 2005), passing characteristics and scoring patterns in the Australian A-League (Garratt et al, 2017), the time or period of goals occurrence in the Champions League. Europe 2012 (Mitrotasios & Armatas, 2012), including an analysis of goals scored during the 2006 World Cup (Armatas & Yiannakos, 2010), the number of passes and fouls that occurred in several areas of the football game (Beauchamp et al, 2005), the pattern of goals scored in Women's World Cup 2019 (Wang & Qin, 2020), analysis of one of the English Premier League teams, namely Crystal Palace in scoring goals in several matches in the English League (Kim et al, 2019), and scoring patterns in the 2018 World Cup (Kubayi, 2020).…”