The problem of evaluating the performance of soccer players is attracting the
interest of many companies and the scientific community, thanks to the
availability of massive data capturing all the events generated during a match
(e.g., tackles, passes, shots, etc.). Unfortunately, there is no consolidated
and widely accepted metric for measuring performance quality in all of its
facets. In this paper, we design and implement PlayeRank, a data-driven
framework that offers a principled multi-dimensional and role-aware evaluation
of the performance of soccer players. We build our framework by deploying a
massive dataset of soccer-logs and consisting of millions of match events
pertaining to four seasons of 18 prominent soccer competitions. By comparing
PlayeRank to known algorithms for performance evaluation in soccer, and by
exploiting a dataset of players' evaluations made by professional soccer
scouts, we show that PlayeRank significantly outperforms the competitors. We
also explore the ratings produced by {\sf PlayeRank} and discover interesting
patterns about the nature of excellent performances and what distinguishes the
top players from the others. At the end, we explore some applications of
PlayeRank -- i.e. searching players and player versatility --- showing its
flexibility and efficiency, which makes it worth to be used in the design of a
scalable platform for soccer analytics.

本文介绍 PlayeRank，一个基于数据驱动的框架，可提供多维度、角色感知的足球运动员表现评估，通过与其他算法和专业球探的评估比较，表明 PlayeRank 在表现评估方面显著优于竞争对手，同时探讨了该框架的一些应用，展示了其灵活性和效率，值得用于设计一个可扩展的足球分析平台。