The chances to win a football match can be significantly increased if the right tactic is chosen and the behavior of the opposite team is well anticipated. For this reason, every professional football club employs a team of game analysts. However, at present game performance analysis is done manually and therefore highly time-consuming. Consequently, automated tools to support the analysis process are required. In this context, one of the main tasks is to summarize team formations by patterns such as 4-4-2. In this paper, we introduce an analytics approach that automatically classifies and visualizes the team formation based on the players' position data. We focus on single match situations instead of complete halftimes or matches to provide a more detailed analysis. A detailed analysis of individual match situations depending on ball possession and match segment length is provided. For this purpose, a visual summary is utilized that summarizes the team formation in a match segment. An expert annotation study is conducted that demonstrates 1) the complexity of the task and 2) the usefulness of the visualization of single situations to understand team formations. The suggested classification approach outperforms existing methods for formation classification. In particular, our approach gives insights about the shortcomings of using patterns like 4-4-2 to describe team formations.

本文提供了一种基于球员位置数据的自动分类和可视化团队编队的分析方法，专注于单个比赛情境以提供更详细的分析，从而提供足球比赛中战术策略的性能改进建议。

4-4-2是否存在？——单场比赛形势中理解和分类足球队形的分析方法