ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relevance of data analyses from context-free game events and their practice-oriented interpretation. First of all, it is about constitutes athletic performance is in sports games, especially in soccer, and how this can be made measurable. It then shows how, despite the complexity of the interaction process, the practice-logical combination of individual parameters into an index can provide meaningful insights, even from context-free event data. Here, the investigation of team tactical attacking behavior with respect to direct or ball possession play is used as an illustration. From indicators that have often been used individually so far, such as relative ball possession distribution, pass success rates, proportion of passes in the direction of play, speed of play, and the comparison of ball recovery times, among others, the practice-relevant concepts of game control as well as attacking behavior were operationalized and indexed. Finally, the chapter highlights that the contextual content of information is as crucial for the credibility of data in practice as the meaningful combination of several parameters and the “translation” of the data into the video image.
