Mapping the interactions that drive the collective motion of soccer players during gameplay

The coordinated movements of soccer players during a game bear a remarkable resemblance to the flocking, schooling, and swarming formations found in nature. These patterns emerge from the complex interactions between individual players, the game’s constraints, and the physical limitations of the players and their environment. The result is a self-organizing system where emergent motion is driven by constant adaptations among individuals in response to competitive pressures. In this study, we use the force-mapping approach, a technique that is commonly applied to animal collectives, to investigate the spatial interactions between individual players and environmental elements such as the field boundary. This method has been extensively detailed in previous studies (Mudaliar and Schaerf, 2020) and provides a representation for how individuals adjust their motion based upon the relative position of neighbouring teammates. We analysed changes in speed and direction of motion for all possible pairs of players at each time step, breaking them down into component form. Through this analysis, we inferred the interaction rules that govern collective motion in response to the relative position of teammates. Our aim was to identify the presence of rules similar to those used in theoretical self-propelled particle models, such as repulsion, alignment and attraction that can be used a basis to simulate player motion. The analysis was further extended to include the distributions of descriptive statistics covering interpersonal distances (by topological rank), distances between players and the formation centroid at each time point and maximum size of playing formation in the cross-field and down-field directions. This provides an understanding of the link between player interactions and the emergent properties of the formations.