Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computers & Graphics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cag

Special Section on SIBGRAPI 2019

How do soccer teams coordinate consecutive passes? A visual

analytics system for analysing the complexity of passing sequences
using soccer flow motifs
Jose Luis Sotomayor Malqui a, Noemí Maritza Lapa Romero a, Rafael Garcia a,
Hande Alemdar b, João L.D. Comba a,∗
a
Instituto de Informática – UFRGS, Brazil
b
Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The analysis of passing strategies plays a major role in soccer. Soccer managers use scouting, video
Received 16 April 2019 footage, and soccer data feed to collect information about tactics and player performance. However, the
Revised 23 August 2019
nature of passing strategies is complex enough to reflect what is happening in the match and makes it
Accepted 29 August 2019
hard to understand its dynamics. Furthermore, there exists a growing demand for pattern detection and
Available online 3 September 2019
passing analysis popularized by FC Barcelona’s tiki-taka. In this paper, we describe a visual analytics sys-
Keywords: tem to analyze the sequence and trajectory of consecutive passing sequences. We describe a two-phase
Computers and graphics clustering algorithm that extracts typical trajectory clusters in passing sequences, which result in eight
Formatting predominant clusters. The combined analysis of the sequence and trajectory clusters allow experts to
Guidelines perform multi or single-game analysis in various ways. We show the potential of our approach in case
studies using data from the Brazilian and Turkish leagues and report feedback from soccer experts.
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction events, previous works [3–5] study particular sequences of events

Soccer is a widely popular sport and the one with more rev-
enues in the global sports events market. Managers, advertisers,
and club owners follow the performance of a team in detail. To
gain competitive advantage and success in local matches and in-
ternational tournaments, the use of data in soccer has seen a huge
growth in recent years [1]. In contrast with other sports, the low
probabilities of scoring in soccer and the team strategies add to
the complexity of game analysis. The complexity increases due to
external variables like weather, home advantage, team formations,
among others. The analysis of soccer matches allows a team to
learn about its errors and to study the adversary.
The analysis of different formations has been widely studied
since the beginning of soccer [2]. Match statistics benefit both
coaches and players by adding performance information to their
knowledge. However, apart from key events in a soccer match
such as shots, goals, fouls, and number of passes, there exists an
interest from the research community to understand the dynamic
aspect of the game. To deal with the complexity of the game
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: comba@inf.ufrgs.br (J.L.D. Comba).
that might result in real scoring opportunities. These events could
be player positions, shots or the positioning of the ball during a
passing sequence. Hughes and Franks [6] show that, for successful
teams, longer ball possessions were confirmed to produce more
goals than shorter passing sequences. Simultaneously, the preven-
tion of ball loss reduces the probability of taking a goal because of
counter-attacks. Recent studies are revealing a growing interest in
studying the complexity structure of passing strategies [5,7] and
their impact in crucial plays in matches.
The goal of our work is to complement the analysis of se-
quences of four consecutive passes proposed by Gyarmati and
Anguera [5], also called soccer flow motifs, which allowed to
confirm the FC Barcelona as having a unique style of play. In
addition to their combinatorial analysis of soccer flows motifs,
we propose to consider the position of players (trajectory) in
passing sequences. As it is well known, soccer passing benefits
from triangular formations to create opportunities for offensive
and defensive plays, as well as spread out players on the pitch
allows a team to take advantage of space efficiently and move
the ball throughout the length of the field. We propose a Visual
Analitcs (VA) system to allow the exploration of the trajectory of
passing sequences and their relationship with the players involved,
and validate our proposal with case studies using soccer data from

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2019.08.010
0097-8493/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
premier soccer leagues. In summary, we outline the main research
contributions of this paper as follows:
• A Visual Analytics system that supports the interactive analysis
of passing sequences using soccer flow motifs.
• An unsupervised approach to discover trajectory patterns in
soccer flow motifs based on clustering by trajectory similarity.
• A case study of passing strategy analysis using data from the
Brazilian Serie A 2015 dataset.
• A second case study using data from Turkish Super League
2016, with feedback from soccer analysts and training staff.
2. Related work
We report related work focused on the statistical properties of
soccer matches and visual analytics of sports data.
2.1. Statistical approaches for understanding soccer
Statistic analysis uses data mining and information discovery
research. Gudmundsson and Wolle [8] developed tools to cluster
passes and movement of individual players. They calculate all pos-
sible passing alternatives in a given time and compute the most
frequent pass sequences. Additionally, they computed correlations
between sub-trajectory clusters computed from players movement
as an evaluation of common actions. Lucey et al. [9] highlighted
the problem of alignment when dealing with multi-agent trajec-
tories and presented a representation based on the player “role”
instead of its “identity”. They showed an effective way of discover-
ing team formation, and soccer plays using the proposed role rep-
resentation. Pena and Touchette [10] used tools from network the-
ory to describe soccer team strategies. They defined a passing net-
work with players as nodes and edges weighted by the number of
passes completed among them. From the resulting network, they
identify soccer play patterns, determine key events and potential
weaknesses. Wei et al. [11] explored the “role-representation” and
used a feature reduction strategy to create a compact spatiotempo-
ral representation. They found the most likely formation patterns
of a team and showed a match segmentation used to detect game
phases without manual intervention. Lucey et al. [12] used Occu-
pancy maps to make comparisons between each team’s style of
play. They visualized the difference of occupancy between home
and away matches and provided a method of automatically flag-
ging behavioral differences. This work was followed by Bialkowski
et al. [13], which utilized a formation descriptor to determine the
identity of a team. To do so, they minimize the entropy of role-
specific occupancy maps. Milo et al. [14] introduced the concept
of a network motif, which defines that passing networks can be
reduced to complex networks to find structure similarities and
perform information processing. To quantify soccer changes, Lucey
et al. [15] presented a method to estimate the likelihood of chances
of scoring. They trained a logistic regressor with strategic features
such as defender proximity, speed of play and defensive formation.
Regarding large-scale analysis, Bialkowski et al. [16] also worked
with large datasets and presented a method to conduct both indi-
vidual player and team analysis. They discovered player roles from
data by utilizing a minimum entropy data partitioning method and
automatically detected formations. Gyramati et al. [17] used “flow
motifs” of passes to characterize a team behavior to find simi-
larities and disparities between teams using data from European
Leagues. We expand on their motif analysis by considering the re-
lation with the trajectory clusters we were able to identify in pass-
ing sequences. With an emphasis in the study of passing behavior
in soccer, Rein et al. [7] studies passing patterns in front of the goal
by estimating the control of space and number of defenders using
Voronoi diagrams. This proposal complements our approach and
offers other insights into the complex study of passing sequences.
123
2.2. Visual analytics systems for sports data
In combination with statistics, visualization, and analytics tech-
niques are used to extract insights from sports data [18,19]. A pop-
ular visual design is heatmaps [20], which displays the field of
play using a color mapping proportional to the frequency of posi-
tions in a given location. Another one is the flow graph [21] where
a graph represents a team, with players as nodes and the links
show the connections between players. There are several visual an-
alytics systems for sports analytics. Soccer Scoop [22] and Match-
Pad [23] use glyph-based visualizations to compare soccer play-
ers and analyze performances during games. CourtVision [24] and
SnapShot [25], respectively designed for basketball and hockey, in-
troduce specific types of heatmaps focused on the ball and puck
shots. Legg et al. [26] describe a visual search system for Rugby
matches. They used a sketch-based interface to perform a search
without semantic annotation. Perin et al. [27] developed a tool that
offers different views on soccer match data for event comparison
and generating automatic reports. Janetwzko et al. [28] detected
relevant events and phases semi-automatically by integrating sta-
tistical features. Soccer drawn is a visualization that presents an
analysis of a soccer game representing continuous movements of
the ball as lines [29]. The position of the lines in the same part
of the pitch reveals trends in how the game was played. Soccer
simulations create visualizations of matches to help managers im-
prove their decision making. Shao et al. [4] propose a novel ap-
proach for searching trajectory data in soccer matches in which the
user sketches a situation of interest based on two different simi-
larity measures. Stein and Sacha [30] use a parallel coordinate plot
for statistical analysis. It includes a density distribution represen-
tation of clustered data for activity phases of professional soccer
players. Our proposal allows the analysis of soccer trajectories of
passing sequences. In follow-up work, Stein et al. [31] proposes
an integrated VA system that brings video footage to the analy-
sis of soccer matches. The evolution of the spatiotemporal position
of players and tactical systems is discussed in the recent works by
Machado et al. [32] and Wu et al. [33].
3. Soccer flow motifs
In this Section, we introduce the notion of soccer flow motifs
used in the visual analytics system to perform pass analysis.
3.1. Soccer passing sequences
To help introduce the definition of a soccer passing sequence,
we explain the contents of the two soccer datasets we use in
this work. The first one is the 2015 Brazilian Serie A season F24
Opta feed [1]. The F24 Opta feed consists of XML files with event
tags, describing specific match situations along with their position.
Some events include passes, fouls, tackles, and corners. Due to data
restrictions, we consider only the second half of the season. This
dataset consists of 180 games with more than 30 0,0 0 0 events. The
analysis of this dataset considered 18 games per team. The second
dataset was provided by Sentio Sports [34], which offers a semi-
automated computer vision based solution for producing player
locations and pass information. It includes 144 games from the
2016/2017 Turkish Super League. Since both datasets come in dif-
ferent formats, we wrote specific parsers to extract the relevant
fields for our approach: pass events, player identity, and event po-
sition. The format of a pass event Pn is
Pn =< id, x, y, playeri , player j , t (n ) >
where playeri is the player who passed the ball at time t(n) to
playerj . To identify a pass sequence it is necessary to establish that
team kept ball possession. For this to happen, the following pass
124 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
Fig. 1. Soccer flow motifs: (a) five possible motifs: ABAB, ABAC, ABCA, ABCB and
ABCD; (b) example that shows a passing sequence of 8 players and how a sliding
window identifies the 5 different motifs.
in a sequence starts from the player that received the pass pre-
viously. Also, the time interval between passes must be within a
given maximal time Tmax . In our tests, we compute ball possessions
for each match using a threshold Tmax of 5 s.
Ball possession is formally defined by Gyarmati et al. [17] as a
sequence of passes that fulfill two constraints:
player j (m ) = playeri (m + 1 ), ∀m ∈ {1, . . . , n − 1}
t (m + 1 ) − t (m ) ≤ Tmax , ∀m ∈ {1, . . . , n − 1}
3.2. The sequence of players in a soccer flow motif
A passing sequence is computed when a team has possession
of the ball. For each possession, we use the soccer flow motif
of passing sequences as described by Gyarmati et al. [17] that
introduces a sequence of three passes, involving up to four distinct
players (referenced by letters A, B, C, and D). Each four-letter
sequence is called a soccer flow motif. As can be seen in Fig. 1,
there are five distinct combinations. For instance, the flow motif
ABAC represents a sequence of passes with three different players:
player A passes to player B, player B passes back to player A
and finally, player A passes to player C. Their approach does not
consider the identity of the involved players and focuses on the
passing sequence to identify different styles of play. Among the
exciting results they present, they were able to identify a unique
style of play for FC Barcelona among teams in Europe. As it is
well-known, FC Barcelona uses a passing sequence known as tiki-
taka, where players pass the ball back and forth. They demonstrate
that FC Barcelona stands out from other teams, in particular, due
to reduced use of the ABCD motif.
3.3. The trajectory of soccer flow motifs
Soccer coaches often train their teams to perform triangula-
tions [35], referring to the triangular position of players in short
passing sequences, which reveals the importance of the position
of players to understand passing sequences. For this purpose, we
need to consider the position of players in a passing sequence, also
called passing trajectory. A passing trajectory is composed of the
positions of players in a passing sequence. Unlike the combinato-
rial structure of the soccer motifs described above, when looking
at the position of players, it is necessary to discuss how this in-
formation is extracted from the data available. For example, if we
consider a passing sequence with four players, it is necessary to
include two additional player positions, since the second and third
players in the motif might move after receiving the pass. The re-
sulting six players position define a polyline that captures the tra-
jectory of the soccer flow motif. The insight given by the combined
analysis of the structure and trajectory of soccer flow motifs is ex-
ploited in our approach.
4. Clustering the trajectories of soccer flow motifs
The proposal of Gyarmati et al. [17] is fascinating, but it does
not take into account the trajectory shape of soccer flow motifs.
Clustering passing sequences by trajectory shapes can help iden-
tify passing strategies, specially for soccer where shapes as trian-
gles and diamonds are very common in the sport language. In par-
ticular, we posed ourselves the question: is it possible to cluster
the shape of passing trajectories formed by the position of players
in the order that the passes take place? Several points must be ad-
dressed to answer this question. For example, we need to define
how to compute the similarity between passing trajectories based
on shape. More importantly, we need to choose a clustering algo-
rithm. In this section, we explain how we addressed these ques-
tions.
4.1. Computing the similarity of passing trajectories
We need to define a metric that compares the shape of two
passing trajectories based on the position of players when passing
the ball. As explained above, a passing trajectory is composed of
six positions instead of just the expected four positions of players.
For each ball possession, we select all three-pass sub-possessions,
composed of six player positions.
To compute the trajectory similarity, we use a metric that finds
the best alignment among sets of points. We need a similarity
metric to compare passing trajectories that is both invariant to ro-
tation and length of passes. For this purpose, in a pre-processing
step, we resample passing sequences and apply invariant transfor-
mations. The preprocessing step consists of four operations: resam-
pling, rotation, scaling, and translation. To improve the accuracy of
similarity comparisons, we increase the resolution in the six-player
trajectory by doing an equidistant sampling of n points over the
trajectory. We empirically chose n = 16 since it represented a rea-
sonable balance between computation speed and accuracy during
the similarity comparisons. We sum the distances between each
player and divide this length by n − 1 to obtain an increment be-
tween each resampled point. The trajectory is processed from the
first pass position adding an increment in X-axis, to create new
points using linear interpolation.
For the rotation operation, we use the “indicative angle” ap-
proach [36] to approximate the best rotation angle that aligns two
trajectories. Since passing trajectories may vary in size depending
on the pass distance, we apply a non-uniform scale transformation
to a squared domain. Even though horizontal or vertical lines may
distort by a non-uniform scaling, we identify trajectories by testing
if the smaller dimension of the bounding box exceeds a thresh-
old (0.02% of the pitch length). If it does, we scale them uniformly
and translate to a reference point. We rotate trajectories around its
centroid by its indicative angle. All trajectories are represented as
a feature vector v = [x1 , y1 , x2 , y2 , ... , xn , yn ] with n = 16. Where
x, y are 2D coordinates from the trajectory sampled points after
preprocessing.
Given the previous alignment, the similarity of passing sub-
sequences requires to rotate two vector trajectories vt and vg in
an angle (θ ) that minimizes the distance between each point. To
overcome this problem, we use the approach for gesture recogni-
tion described by Li [37]. It uses the optimal angular distance, which
computes the cosine distance to find the angle between two vec-
tors in a high-dimensional space. This allows finding the optimal
angle much faster, thus improving the number of computations.
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
Fig. 2. Sum of squared error (SSE) for different K values using the elbow
method [38]. We used K = 50 and K = 8 for the K-means and spectral clustering,
where the SSE decreased abruptly.
Previous work [37] showed to be possible to solve this optimiza-
tion problem in closed-form with the equation:
 vt (θ ) · vg 
θoptimal = arg min arccos
−π ≤θ ≤π |vt (θ )||vg |
where vt (θ ) is the vector obtained after rotating vt by θ . We used
the optimal angular distance for comparing flow motifs.
4.2. Two-stage clustering of soccer flow motifs
We present a clustering algorithm that separates ball trajecto-
ries, regardless of the length of the passes and orientation. We first
considered using a spectral clustering algorithm, since it is graph-
based and suited for computing similarity of trajectories that are
rotation invariant, represented by their optimal angular distance. In
our preliminary tests, spectral clustering was able to produce good
results for small sets of trajectories but became too slow when
processing the entire collection of trajectories. Spectral Cluster-
ing computes the eigenvalue decomposition of the Laplacian ma-
trix, which is computationally expensive for large matrices due to
the required eigendecomposition computations. To overcome this
problem, we decided to use a preliminary filtering step that re-
lies on a simpler and more efficient clustering algorithm, such as
K-means. The main reason to use K-means, and therefore a two-
step clustering approach, was to reduce the number of trajectories
to be considered by spectral clustering. Also, the K-means algo-
rithm using the Euclidean distance does not allow to discriminate
trajectory by orientation. Hence, the orientation grouping is per-
formed by Spectral Clustering.
The resulting two-step clustering algorithm works as follows. In
the first step, a K-means algorithm with the Euclidean distance re-
duces the number of trajectories and discover global clusters. Since
the K-means clustering does not allow to discriminate trajectories
by orientation, we use a graph-based spectral clustering that uses a
similarity distance based on the rotation angle between needed to
minimize the distance between trajectories. The input for spectral
clustering is the similarity matrix computed with optimal angular
distance from the trajectory centroids obtained with K-means. The
result of the spectral clustering outputs the most common clusters
of passing trajectories.
We ran the clustering algorithm several times to find the num-
ber of clusters and prevent loss of information. We first validate
our algorithm using the Brazilian league dataset. We select the
number of clusters using the Elbow method, a standard approach
to finding the number of clusters. In Fig. 2 we show that a good
number of clusters for K-means is 50 representative. The clus-
ters fromK-means are sent to the Spectral Clustering. The elbow
method suggests a good separation using 8 clusters. In the Turk-
ish dataset, we obtained 25 clusters for K-means, and the same 8
clusters for spectral clustering.
125
Fig. 3. Example of ball trajectory bundling. We draw each of the segments of a
passing trajectory in different colors. We display passing trajectories without (left)
and with bundling (right).
The display of all passing sequences inside each one of the 8
clusters generated by spectral clustering gives an intuition of the
shape of the cluster. Since drawing all passing trajectories may lead
to overplotting, we used an edge-bundling algorithm [39] to sum-
marize the high-level trajectory (Fig. 3). Using this approach, we
visualize the resulting 8 clusters in Fig. 4 along with representative
passing sequences displayed in their actual location on the pitch.
We display passing sequences using red, blue, and green segments,
corresponding to the first, second, and third passes, respectively.
For simplicity, we used a nickname for each cluster that encodes
the shape of the cluster. Trajectories in cluster 1 and 3 have three
collinear players and a single pass with a divergent angle. How-
ever, in cluster 3 both sides have a similar length (creating a peak),
whereas one of the sides of cluster 1 is shorter (swoosh). Cluster
5 has a bowl shape due to two consecutive passes with a similar
right angle. Clusters 2 and 4 present a zig-zag pattern. The angles
between trajectories in cluster 4 are similar, but in cluster 2 it has
one smaller acute angle. The acute angle suggests a small player
movement due to a wall pass (side peak). Clusters 6 and 7 rep-
resent passes that close a circuit, which returns the ball near the
original position with a crossing (cluster 6) or closer to the first
point (cluster 7). Finally, cluster 8 contains passes in a straight hor-
izontal or vertical line. Fig. 5 shows the pipeline of our approach.
5. Visual analytics system
We designed an interactive visual analytics prototype to sup-
port the analysis of soccer flow motifs in single and multiple
matches. In the first version of the prototype, we used soccer anal-
ysis research questions to formulate preliminary tasks to drive the
visualization design and interaction techniques. The goal was to
build a user interface that supported multiple filtering capabilities
couple with interactive visualization of the passing sequences. This
prototype considered only the Brazilian league dataset. The second
version of the prototype was developed after receiving the Turk-
ish league dataset from Sentio Sports and interacting with their
staff, as well as feedback from the coaching staff of Turkish teams.
This latter interaction was instrumental in revising our list of re-
quirements and improving several aspects of our prototype. Upon
request, we also prepared special reports for upcoming matches in
the Turkish league. In this section, we present the main compo-
nents, features, and visualizations of our visual analytics system. In
Fig. 6, we show screenshots of several components of the interface.
5.1. Support for single and multiple match analysis
The system is designed to support the analysis of individual or
multiple matches at once (Fig. 6(a)). As requested by the experts,
we allow the analyst wants to inspect the behavior of a given team
in individual or multiple matches (e.g., all matches, matches at
126 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133

Fig. 4. Trajectory cluster visualization using edge-bundling. Each cluster is composed of three passes in red (first), blue (second) and green (third). On top we show all 50
clusters generated by K-means, and include along each cluster the index from one of the eight clusters generated by spectral clustering. In the middle we summarize the
shape of the 8 clusters. At the bottom, for each cluster we give examples of passing sequences that occurred during matches. (For interpretation of the references to color
in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 5. Clustering pipeline. Input: sequences of three passes are resampled and transformed to be invariant to orientation and location. Transformed sequences are processed
by a k-means and a spectral clustering. In the output, we generate clusters that encode the trajectories most used.
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133 127

Fig. 6. Screenshots from the visual analytics interface: (a) in a first tab, matches can be selected individually or in groups from a search box and a drop-down list; upon
selection, a second tab (b–g) display the details of the selected matches; (b) motifs of selected match(es) can be filtered in several ways: by team, by type of motif, by cluster,
by origin and destination (defense, middle, and attack) and displayed using several parameters (colors of segments, transparency, etc.); (c) a histogram counts the number
of occurrences of players in motifs; (d) counts of motifs by type, by cluster, and by origin and destination; (e) timeline view display motifs in time and also filtering by time
intervals; (f) filtered motifs trajectories displayed over the pitch; (g) heatmap of filtered motifs; (h) a third tab displays the matrix count of motifs by type and cluster, one
for each team and pitch position. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

home, away matches, against a specific team, matches of the first nated views. Therefore changes in the selections reflect in the in-
or second half of the season, etc.). As the system may support sev- formation displayed (e.g., the passing sequences).
eral matches, support for searching for strings containing parts of
the team name is also supported. Once the matches are selected,
the interface opens in a separate tab analysis window.
5.3. Histogram of player participation in motifs

5.2. Selections of motifs and trajectories
We have five different sequence motifs and eight different tra-
jectory clusters. Therefore it is important to support filtering the
analysis by any combination of motifs and trajectories (Fig. 6(b)).
The selections are used to configure the passing sequences that
will be displayed. One possibility is selecting all passing sequences
for a single team, or a single match. Motifs and Cluster can all dis-
played or selected individually. We can display passing sequences
in all regions of the field, or individually (defense, middle, or at-
tack). The segments of a passing sequence (red, blue, or green)
can all be selected or displayed individually. Finally, we can specify
the region that contains the origin and destination, from all possi-
ble combinations to selections (middle to attach, defense to attack,
etc.). It is important to stress that the user interface has coordi-
A histogram is displayed to reveal how many times a given
player participated in the selected motifs (Fig. 6(c)). Since all views
are coordinated, any changes in the selection or filtering parame-
ters are automatically updated in the histograms. The user can also
select specific players in the histogram to narrow the selection to
those players. This was a special feature requested by the expert,
a report on the motif participation of a specific player. The mo-
tifs of all matches selected in the previous step are displayed in an
analysis window that supports narrowing the scope of the study
using several filters. By default, all motifs are displayed, but filter-
ing allows choosing a specific sequence motif or trajectory cluster.
We can select motifs that start and end at a specific region of the
pitch (e.g., passes from defense to middle field), as well as change
visual cues used to display motifs (such as colors and transparency
of passing segments).
128 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
Fig. 7. Soccer motifs frequency for Brazilian Serie A. Top two teams in the league
were also the top two teams on three-passing sequences. Histograms are ordered
by final place in the fixture ranking.
5.4. Statistics of motifs and trajectories
We summarize the statistics of motifs and trajectories to allow
comparison (Fig. 6(d)). Also, we display statistics of the number of
motifs that start and end at specific regions of the pitch. This was
a special request of our experts that want to inspect motifs from
the middle to attack.
5.5. Timeline summary and selection
A timeline is essential to summarize when the motifs take place
during a match (Fig. 6(e)). Experts often want to focus the analy-
sis at specific periods of the match with more detail (begin or end
of the match). The timeline both displays a summarization of the
motifs in time, as well as allows the user to define the start and
end of the time interval to consider. In the x-axis, we used the
time of the match when the pass sequence occurred. Thus values
vary between 0 and 90 min (generally). For the y-axis, we used
the real y-coordinate but scaled to the view map. When analyz-
ing small trajectories, this visualization is very useful to know at
which minute a team has passing sequences on the right or left of
the field. If the team is playing at home, the top of the visualiza-
tion corresponds to the left band, and the bottom side corresponds
to the right band. Selections in the timeline are coordinated and
reflect in the other views.
5.6. Display of flow motifs on pitch and heatmap
The current selection of soccer flow motifs is displayed over the
pitch. The analyst can inspect individual motifs and check which
players are involved (Fig. 6(f) and (g)). It is important to men-
tion that the trajectories drawn over the field correspond to the
Fig. 8. Top four teams on defense, middle, and offense ordered by cluster 2. Rows
correspond to clusters 1–8. The sequence of four columns under each team to mo-
tifs ABAB, ABAC, ABCA, and ABCB. We show the final fixture position in the league
after the team name (in parenthesis). The first three teams in the league (Corinthi-
ans, Atlético-MG and Grêmio) are on the top four ranking in the middle and
offense motifs, while Corinthians is the only one to appears on defense (in first
place).
actual position of players, not the ones used during the cluster-
ing process. Each of the three pass segments is displayed using a
color mapping. By default, we use in order the red, green, and blue
and for the segments. To represent player positions, we use a cir-
cle, cross, square, and a triangle mapped to the role of the player
on a motif structure: A, B, C or D, respectively. We used a trajec-
tory heatmap as an alternative view to the pitch visualization. The
rainbow colormap used in our visualizations is the standard choice
for displaying heatmaps in soccer broadcasting and statistical sites.
The difference from standard soccer heatmaps is that we use the
pass trajectory instead of players positions. The trajectory heatmap
is used to represent the passing sequence on a given time window.
Trajectory heatmaps solve the problem of occlusion while visualiz-
ing multiple motifs. We map colors to the number of times the tra-
jectory passed through a point on the pitch. Thus, yellow and red
areas represent parts of the game where passes occurred more.
This visualization design suffers from severe overplotting when
there are a great number of trajectories displayed, as is this the
case in Fig. 6(f) and (g). However, as we will demonstrate with the
case studies that follow, the selection in the coordinated interface
of specific passing sequences (by motif, cluster, team, time, a re-
gion of the field) has the effect of greatly reducing the number
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
Fig. 9. Display of flow motifs on the pitch and trajectory heatmaps. Top: corinthians. Bottom: Grêmio. Columns represent the type of the soccer motif structure. The
trajectory heatmaps represent places where players moved the ball with more frequency in the side peak cluster. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure,
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
of trajectories. Therefore the analysis can become more interesting,
even to the point of listing the name of players involved in the
passing sequence and other details.
5.7. Frequency motif matrix
The interplay of sequence motifs (five) and trajectory clusters
(eight) leads to possible 40 possible combinations. We use a fre-
quency motif matrix to display the counting of each of these com-
binations. The motif ABCD was excluded from the matrix because
its frequency is too high in comparison with the other motifs.
Therefore, it ended up dominating the visualization because we
scale the color of each matrix cell by the corresponding count. Not
having the ABCD motif is a limitaiton of our system, but it allowed
to focus the analysis in motifs with at least one repeating player.
For each team, we create separate matrices for each pitch zone in
which the passing sequences occur: defense, middle, and offense.
It is possible to reorder teams by zone, motif structure, and cluster.
The display of different matrices side-by-side is useful for compar-
ing different passing patterns.
6. Brazilian Serie a 2015 case study
The first case study to validate our approach uses the 2015
Brazilian Serie A dataset. We present three types of analysis: team
characterization based on cluster frequency, a comparison between
teams based on the passing clusters displayed on the pitch, and an
evaluation of individual players based on motifs.
129
6.1. Overall analysis of clusters frequency
The frequency of the 8 discovered trajectory clusters gives an
overall insight of the matches (Fig. 7). We display on top two his-
tograms, including all motifs and including all but the ABCD motif.
For simplicity when showing these histograms to soccer experts,
we refer to motifs that have at least one repeated player as struc-
tured motifs (assuming a player repetition is a sign of structure
in the passing sequence). Similarly, we call unstructured the motif
ABCD (different players).
Cluster 1 has the highest number of passing sequences, while
cluster 2 and 3 have nearly half the number of cluster 1. In the
histogram without motif ABCD, we see a change in the order be-
tween cluster 1 and 2 as the most applied sequence and a similar
distribution for cluster 5 and 6. In the remaining discussion, we
use the top two frequent clusters 1 and 2 to investigate passing
behavior. Fig. 7 also shows the histogram of clusters per team, or-
dered by final fixture place. Top-ranked teams have more passing
motifs than lower ranked teams.
We use the frequency motif matrix to obtain an overview of
the motif distribution. We display the result for each team side-
by-side, ordered by the total number of passing sequences on clus-
ter 2 (Fig. 8). The matrix was filtered to show the clusters for the
top four teams in different zones (defense, middle, and offense).
Corinthians far exceeds the second place Vasco on defensive mo-
tifs, largely on clusters 1, 2, 4 and 8 with ABCB motifs. In general,
ABCB and ABAC motifs both consist of a simple pass followed by
a wall pass. They differ in whether the wall pass was made at the
beginning or end of the sequence. Motifs ABAC and ABCB were the
130 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133

top two used by Corinthians. On the other hand, offensive motifs

have an equal distribution. Corinthians sustained a high frequency
in clusters 1, 2, 4, and 8. We notice that the top 3 teams from
the final standings appear in top positions in the offensive region.
However, of those three teams, Corinthians is the only one which
appears in the defensive ranking. In the middle, we observe that
teams with more structured passing finished in the top positions
of the final fixture. Although the pattern of motifs occurrence in
the top three teams is similar, the biggest difference lies in the first
column (ABAB). Corinthians used more passes of cluster 6, which
correspond to a crossing shape. Such clusters begin and end at the
closer position, which is suitable to keep ball possession without
compromising the ability to transport the ball forward.

6.2. Analysis of motifs over the pitch

We display the flow motifs over the pitch and heatmap to

find places that passing sequences occur. We show results for top
teams Corinthians and Grêmio using the four structured motifs.
Fig. 9 shows a predominance of a vertical pass at the end of the
sequence (shown in green) for motifs ABAC and vertical passes at
the start (shown in red) for motif ABCB. One reason for this be-
havior might be that the long pass from cluster 2 depends on the
position of the third different player in the sequence. Results show
that the long pass, after or before the wall pass, is mainly between
the left and right side, probably due to a change in the direction of
play. In the trajectory heatmaps, we compare the defensive passing
sequences of Corinthians to Grêmio. Corinthians uses the center of
the field more consistently than Grêmio, which prefers the left and
right sides.

6.3. Individual player analysis

We perform individual player analysis to find which players Fig. 10. Corinthians players histogram for home and away matches, cluster 1, and
have similar patterns on passing strategies. We compare the player structured motifs. We use colors to map the player names, which are more frequent
histogram and the flow motifs displayed on the Pitch with glyphs in the top places. Renato Augusto was the top Corinthians player at home, but away
mapped to players positions. In Fig. 10 we show the histograms Jadson was more important.
for all games of Corinthians to understand player participation on
passing motifs and how they changed along with the tournament.
We show 18 histograms for nine games played at home and nine
away. Also, we highlight the top three players. Renato Augusto
lead structured passes in five of the nine home matches. This
pattern does not occur at away games, where Jadson leads in
three games and Renato Augusto leads in two. We also noticed
an absence of top players in the last two matches of Corinthians.
Since Corinthians was already the champion, they were played
with reserve players.

7. Turkish Super League 2016–2017 case study

In the second case study, we use the data from the first half of
the 2016/17 Turkish Super League season. The accompanying video
illustrates our system in action for this dataset. The analysis was
carried out together with professional soccer analysts from four
different Turkish teams. They expressed their interest in knowing
which players are more involved in the structured passes execu-
tion and in which regions of the pitch these passes are performed.
Therefore, we structured our analysis accordingly and refined it
based on feedback received.
We analyzed all 16 matches of Basaksehir FC. One of the main Fig. 11. Report of a Turkish Super League match: heatmaps hightlight the regions
interests for analysts the regions of the pitch where the struc- where the passes were performed and histograms show which players participated
most in those passes. This match was a 2-1 victory of Basaksehir (playing at home)
tured and non-structured passes are executed in a match. Our sys- over Rizespor.
tem helps the analyst with this task providing him with tools that
allow the visualization of these regions using heatmaps and his-
tograms with the number of passes executed by each player. The
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133 131

Fig. 12. Top players interacting with the Fenerbahçe player, Skrtel, in the middle field. Souza is the preferred partner of Skrtel in structured passes. Selections of specific
cluster type or zone of the field are useful to identify specific passing sequences, including players involved.
132 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
user can select the motifs, clusters, or regions of the pitch to visu-
alize. Fig. 11 shows the histograms and heatmaps with structured
and non-structured passes of Basaksehir players in a home match
against Rizespor that resulted in a 2–1 victory of Basaksehir. A sim-
ilar report was produced for all matches of Basaksehir and sent to
their coaching staff.
The analysts recognized an interesting aspect in the participa-
tion of Martin Skrtel in structured passes in the middle. Despite
being a central defender, Skrtel is the player with the most partic-
ipation in midfield structured and non-structured passes at Fener-
bahçe. This emphasizes his importance to the play-making of his
team. Most of Skrtel non-structured passes are performed with
defenders as Neustädter and Ali Kaldirim. However, when we se-
lect only structured passes, the player that exchanged more passes
with Skrtel is Souza, a midfielder. The analysts believe this reveals
his importance to the creation system of Fenerbahçe.
We prepared a report to summarize these observations to the
consulted analysts. A highlight of this report is shown in Fig. 12.
We show the most common Skrtel passing partners at home
matches for all, structured and non-structured passes. In our in-
teractive tool, we can select the passing sequence directly over the
pitch, to display the players involved, and the time the passing se-
quence happened. This allows us to check what are the passing
partners for Skrtel in different locations in the field.
8. Discussion
Understanding soccer strategies is a challenging task due to
the complexity of the game. The approach discussed in this paper
moves one step closer to understanding the key aspect of pass-
ing strategies. The work of Gyarmati et al. [17] brought attention
to the study the combinatorial structure of passing sequences. In
this work, we improved their work by adding the analysis of soc-
cer trajectories. We believe that our visual designs can be helpful
to understand global and individual aspects of passing sequences.
For example, the heatmap display is helpful to understand global
strategies, as demonstrated in Fig. 9 where Corinthians blocks the
center of the field better than Grêmio, that prefers the side of the
pitch. This visualization was particularly useful when filtered by
the type of motifs. The display of motifs in the pitch becomes use-
ful when performing individual player analysis, as demonstrated
in Fig. 12. In this example, we study the motifs associated with a
given player to understand its trajectory styles by looking at the
different trajectory cluster types. To reduce overplotting, we can
narrow the analysis to specific intervals in the match using the
timeline, allowing to study individual passing sequences, which
makes the display of motifs in the pitch more useful. Neverthe-
less, our approach has still some limitations. For example, our pro-
totype does not include a link to the video footage. This would
be useful to study a single passing sequence selected. Also, the
study of passing sequences in the current interface relies on ex-
ploratory analysis. We believe that our proposal can be even more
useful if combined with analytics algorithms that suggest passing
sequences. For example, a sketch-based interface could allow the
analyst to draw a given trajectory, and the system would automat-
ically retrieve similar trajectories for further analysis.
9. Conclusions
In this work, we proposed a visual analytics system to support
the analysis of soccer flow motifs. The combined analysis of soc-
cer flow motifs and trajectory clusters support the exploration of
different passing patterns. We combine the notion of a soccer flow
motif with passing trajectories. We describe a two-phase trajectory
clustering technique which leads us to discover we 8 representa-
tive types of passing trajectories.
We designed a Visual Analytics system that supports filtering
and coordinated views of the data, which we used to validate using
matches from both the Brazilian and Turkish leagues. In the Brazil-
ian league, the frequency motif matrix allowed us to compare the
usage of flow motifs for all teams in a league, separating frequen-
cies by shape, passing structure and pitch region. Using our ap-
proach we recognized the defensive style of the league champion
Corinthians for Side Peak (single + wall) passes. We provided meth-
ods for space and time exploration of passing sequences using the
flow motifs on pitch and trajectory heatmaps to reduce cluttered
passes while analyzing multiple matches. We also demonstrated
how useful it could be individual players analysis for assessing per-
formance from soccer managers.
A positive aspect of our results is the deployment of our pro-
totype to experts involved with teams in the Turkish league. Im-
portant feedback we received from the coaching staff is the im-
portance of player analysis. Such feedback helped us improved our
prototype, but more importantly, allowed analysts to reach conclu-
sions about their match that were not possible with previous anal-
ysis tools. We prepared, as special request, reports for a team about
the passing strategies for an upcoming match.
We foresee that our prototype can also be useful for the scout-
ing analysis used for hiring new players. In the future, we would
like to continue the collaboration with soccer teams from premier
leagues. We would like to include spatiotemporal position data of
players to our tool. Also, we want to add links from our analysis
tool to video footage of the soccer match to improve the analysis
at specific passing sequences, as well as a sketch-based interface
to support searching for specific trajectory patterns.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their
valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the
paper. We are especially grateful to Opta Sports and Sentio Sports
for generously providing us with the soccer data set of the Brazil-
ian 2015 league and the Turkish Super league 2016–2017. This
study was partially supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoa-
mento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance
Code 001, CNPq 308851/2015-3, CNPq 426397/2018-5, TUBITAK un-
der the grant number 118C019 and by ODTU BAP under project
code YOP-312- 2018-2816.
Supplementary material
Supplementary material associated with this article can be
found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.cag.2019.08.010.
References
[1] Opta Sports Pro. Opta F24 feed. http://optasports.com/, 2019.
[2] Wilson J. Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics. Nation Books;
2013. ISBN 9781568587387.
[3] Link D, Weber H. Using individual ball possession as a performance indicator
in soccer. Proceeding of the 2015 KDD workshop on large-scale sports analyt-
ics. Sydney, Australia; 2015.
[4] Shao L, Sacha D, Neldner B, Stein M, Schreck T. Visual-interactive search for
soccer trajectories to identify interesting game situations. Visualization and
Data Analysis; 2016.
[5] Gyarmati L, Anguera X. Automatic extraction of the passing strategies of soc-
cer teams. In: Proceedings of the 2015 KDD workshop on large-scale sports
analytics; 2015. p. 0–3.
[6] Hughes M, Franks I. Analysis of passing sequences, shots and goals in soccer. J
Sports Sci 2005;23(5):509–14. PMID: 16194998
 J.L.S. Malqui, N.M.L. Romero and R. Garcia et al. / Computers & Graphics 84 (2019) 122–133
[7] Rein R, Raabe D, Memmert D. “Which pass is better?” novel approaches to
assess passing effectiveness in elite soccer. Hum Movem Sci 2017;55:172–81.
[8] Gudmundsson J, Wolle T. Football analysis using spatio-temporal tools. Comput
Environ Urban Syst 2014;47:16–27.
[9] Lucey P, Bialkowski A, Carr P, Morgan S, Matthews I, Sheikh Y. Representing
and discovering adversarial team behaviors using player roles. In: Proceed-
ings of the 2013 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition
(CVPR); 2013. p. 2706–13.
[10] Peña J, Touchette H. A network theory analysis of football strategies 2012
arXiv:1206.6904.
[11] Wei X, Sha L, Lucey P, Morgan S, Sridharan S. Large-Scale analysis of forma-
tions in soccer. In: Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on digital
image computing: techniques and applications (DICTA); 2013. p. 1–8.
[12] Lucey P, Oliver D, Carr P, Roth J, Matthews I. Assessing team strategy using
spatiotemporal data. In: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM SIGKDD interna-
tional conference on knowledge discovery and data mining; 2013. p. 1366–74.
[13] Bialkowski A, Lucey P, Carr P, Yue Y, Sridharan S, Matthews I. Identifying team
style in soccer using formations learned from spatiotemporal tracking data. In:
Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE international conference on data mining work-
shop; 2014. p. 9–14.
[14] Milo R, Itzkovitz S, Kashtan N, Chklovskii DMB. Network motifs : simple build-
ing blocks of complex networks. Science 2002;298(5594):824–7.
[15] Lucey P, Bialkowski A, Monfort M, Carr P, Matthews I. Quality vs quan-
tity: improved shot prediction in soccer using strategic features from
spatiotemporal data . The venue is MIT SLOAN Sports Analytics Confer-
ence; 2015. http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/
02/SSAC15- RP- Finalist- Quality- vs- Quantity.pdf
[16] Bialkowski A, Lucey P, Carr P, Yue Y, Sridharan S, Matthews I. Large-scale anal-
ysis of soccer matches using spatiotemporal tracking data. In: Proceedings of
the 2014 IEEE international conference on data mining; 2014. p. 725–30.
[17] Gyarmati L, Kwak H, Rodriguez P. Searching for a unique style in soccer. Soc
Inf Netw 2014.
[18] Stein M, Breitkreutz T, Haussler J, Seebacher D, Niederberger C, Schreck T,
et al. Revealing the invisible: visual analytics and explanatory storytelling for
advanced team sport analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2018 international sym-
posium on big data visual and immersive analytics; 2018. p. 1–9.
[19] Perin C, Vuillemot R, Stolper CD, Stasko JT, Wood J, Carpendale S. State of the
art of sports data visualization. Comput Graph Forum 2018;37(3):663–86.
[20] WhoScored. Man. city vs leicester. https://www.whoscored.com/Matches/
1285050/Live/, 2019.
[21] Footscope. Footoscope: Fifa world cup south africa. http://www.footoscope.
com/worldcup2010/, 2010.
[22] Rusu A, Stoica D, Burns E, Hample B, McGarry K, Russell R. Dynamic visual-
izations for soccer statistical analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2010 fourteenth
international conference information visualisation (IV); 2010. p. 207–12.
133
[23] Legg P, Chung D, Parry M, Jones M, Long R, Griffiths I, et al. Matchpad: in-
teractive glyph-based visualization for real-time sports performance analysis.
Comput Graph Forum 2012;31(3pt4):1255–64.
[24] Goldsberry K. Courtvision: new visual and spatial analytics for the NBA. In:
Proceedings of the MIT sloan sports analytics conference; 2012.
[25] Pileggi H, Stolper CD, Boyle JM, Stasko JT. Snapshot: visualization to propel ice
hockey analytics. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 2012;18(12):2819–28.
[26] Legg PA, Chung DHS, Parry ML, Bown R, Jones MW, Griffiths IW, et al. Transfor-
mation of an uncertain video search pipeline to a sketch-based visual analytics
loop. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 2013;19(12):2109–18.
[27] Perin C, Vuillemot R, Fekete JD. Soccerstories: a kick-off for visual soccer anal-
ysis. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 2013;19(12):2506–15.
[28] Janetzko H, Sacha D, Stein M, Schreck T, Keim D, Deussen O. Feature-driven
visual analytics of soccer data. In: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE conference on
visual analytics science and technology (VAST); 2014. p. 13–22.
[29] Rosenthal S.. Football drawings. http://www.susken-rosenthal.de/
fussballbilder/, 2019.
[30] Stein M, Sacha D. Enhancing parallel coordinates : statistical visualizations for
analyzing soccer data. Electron Imag 2016:1–8.
[31] Stein M, Janetzko H, Lamprecht A, Breitkreutz T, Zimmermann P, Goldlucke B,
et al. Bring it to the pitch: combining video and movement data to enhance
team sport analysis. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 2018;24(01):13–22.
[32] Machado V, Leite R, Moura F, Cunha S, Sadlo F, Comba JL. Visual soc-
cer match analysis using spatiotemporal positions of players. Comput Graph
2017;68:84–95.
[33] Wu Y, Xie X, Wang J, Deng D, Liang H, Zhang H, et al. Forvizor: visualiz-
ing spatio-temporal team formations in soccer. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph
2019;25(1):65–75.
[34] Sentio Sports feed. https://sentiosports.com/, 2019.
[35] Sumpter D. Soccermatics: Mathematical adventures in the beautiful game.
Bloomsbury Sigma; 2016.
[36] Wobbrock JO, Wilson AD, Li Y. Gestures without libraries, toolkits or training:
a 1 recognizer for user interface prototypes. In: Proceedings of the twentieth
annual ACM symposium on user interface software and technology UIST 07,
85; 2007. p. 159.
[37] Li Y. Protractor: a fast and accurate gesture recognizer. In: Proceedings of the
twenty-eighth international conference on human factors in computing sys-
tems; 2010. p. 2169–72.
[38] Kodinariya TM, Makwana PR. Review on determining number of clus-
ter in K-means clustering. Int J Adv Res Comput Sci Manag Stud
2013;1(6):2321–7782.
[39] Holten D, van Wijk JJ. Force-directed edge bundling for graph visualization. In:
Proceedings of the eleventh Eurographics/IEEE – VGTC conference on visual-
ization EuroVis’09. UK: Chichester; 2009. p. 983–98.