Defining a historic football team: Using Network Science to analyze Guardiola’s FC Barcelona
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Date
2019-09-19Estado
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersionMetadata
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-- The application of Network Science to social systems has introduced new methodologies to analyze
classical problems such as the emergence of epidemics, the arousal of cooperation between individuals
or the propagation of information along social networks. More recently, the organization of football
teams and their performance have been unveiled using metrics coming from Network Science,
where a team is considered as a complex network whose nodes (i.e., players) interact with the aim of
overcoming the opponent network. Here, we combine the use of diferent network metrics to extract
the particular signature of the F.C. Barcelona coached by Guardiola, which has been considered one of
the best teams along football history. We have frst compared the network organization of Guardiola’s
team with their opponents along one season of the Spanish national league, identifying those metrics
with statistically signifcant diferences and relating them with the Guardiola’s game. Next, we have
focused on the temporal nature of football passing networks and calculated the evolution of all network
properties along a match, instead of considering their average. In this way, we are able to identify those
network metrics that enhance the probability of scoring/receiving a goal, showing that not all teams
behave in the same way and how the organization Guardiola’s F.C. Barcelona is diferent from the rest,
including its clustering coefcient, shortest-path length, largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix,
algebraic connectivity and centrality distribution
Defining a historic football team: Using Network Science to analyze Guardiola’s FC Barcelona
Tipo de Actividad
Artículos en revistasISSN
2045-2322Palabras Clave
--football networks FC Barcelona