ABSTRACT
It is one of the simplest and oldest questions in football and the most difficult to answer at the same time: Who will win? Scientists have been looking for typical characteristics of successful teams’ style of play. However, as is well known, only a few goals are usually scored in football, especially when compared to other sports. At worst, only one goal can determine win or loss after the final whistle. In practice, this constitutes a major hurdle when attempting to connect playing performance with the result. A solution to this problem underlies the use of enormously large samples. This chapter compares the tactical performances of winning and losing teams, based on a Big Data field study from the German Bundesliga. Positional data open up plenty of new possibilities to model the tactical aspects of the game, find patterns, and create novel, advanced performance measures. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) introduced in this chapter include outplayed opponents and pressure efficiency.
