Automatic event detection in football

Congratulations to Ferran Vidal Codina, Nicolas Evans, Bahaeddine El Fakir, and Johsan Billingham on winning the Sports Engineering 2022 Best Paper Award for their paper titled "Automatic event detection in football using tracking data"!

Through their research, they have developed a decision tree algorithm to extract footballing events from ball and player tracking data. The algorithm leverages the rules of football, the spatial configuration of players, and the changes in distance between the players and the ball to automatically detect events with 95%+ accuracy. Their work aims to provide the broader world of football with high quality events data - only available to top-tier competitions due to the high costs of manual annotation - in an automatic, fast, and scalable manner.

Thank you FIFA for many years of productive collaboration with the MIT Sports Lab!

Read the full paper here.