TOPIC: FOOTBALL(AL)

ABSTRACT:
Football was also used recently to advance AI by researchers who successfully created digital
footballers that learned the game as they faced off against each other in a computer simulation.
The project—published in August in Science Robotics, a peer-reviewed scientific journal—used
human motion data and other machine learning systems to enable the players to perform and
improve football skills.

"We tackled the integration of motor control and long-horizon decision-making in the context of
simulated humanoid football, which requires agile motor control and multiagent coordination," the
research team wrote. "Our work constitutes a complete demonstration of learned integrated
decision-making at multiple scales in a multiagent setting."

INTRODUCTION:
Football is a team sport involving two competing teams of eleven field players each, and is
considered the most competitive sport in the world. The modern sport version originates in
England, where in the mid19th century the rules were first published. Today, Millions of people
around the world are watching and playing soccer. Football is the most popular sport in the
world with around 3.5 billion fans around the globe. Football officially known as "Association
Football" and in varied countries referred to as either soccer or football is a team sport played
between two teams, competing to get the ball into the other team's goal, thereby scoring a goal. It
was names association football to distinguish the sport from other forms of football. It is played
by 250 million participants in more than 200 countries and addictions, making it the most
common sport in the world. The game is played according to codified rules known as the Law of
the Game established by the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The main
governing body for the sport worldwide is the International Federation of Association Football
(FIFA). FIFA was founded in 1904 in France, headquartered in Switzerland with a motto of
"For the Game. For the World". The FIFA World Cup is the biggest international football
competition organized by FIFA and hosted every four years by different host nations. The first
World Cup football competition was first held in Uruguay in 1930 and the next World Cup
football tournament will be hosted in Qatar in 2022, when 32 national teams will compete for
the championship. There are six confederations under FIFA which manages the game in the
different continents and regions of the world, i.e. Asian Football Confederation (AFC),
Confederation of African Football (CFA), Union of European Football Associations (UEFA),
Confederation of North, Central American & Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF),
Oceania Football Confederation (OFC), South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL)
Approximately 200 countries compete in the qualifying tournaments in their continental
confederations to reach the final tournament, i.e. the FIFA World Cup. In the world cup 32
national teams compete over a four-week period to become the world champion. It is the most
widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, even more then the Olympic Games.
France was declared as the world champion in the 2018 FIFA World Cup (Men) hosted by
Russia, for the second time and United States was declared as the world champion in the 2019
FIFA World Cup (Women) hosted by France, for the fourth time. UEFA Champions League is
considered to be the most esteemed competition in club football, in the recent years it has been
the most watched annual sporting event. Top division European clubs participate in this
tournament following the double round-robin system. Spanish clubs have the highest number of
victories followed by England and Italy. Real Madrid is the most successful club in the
tournament's history winning it for 13 times. Liverpool is the reigning champion of the UEFA
Championship, 2019. Cristiano Ronaldo a Portuguese footballer and a part of the Juventus club
and Lionel Messi an Argentinian footballer, part of the FC Barcelona club is considered to be
the most decorated football players in the history of football. The Ballon d'Or is considered one
of the Football world's most prestigious honors. This honors the male player considered to have
done the best in the previous year based on votes from national teams ' football journalists &
coaches and captains. In 2019, Lionel Messi won 6 Ballon d'Or and Ronaldo won 5 times. In
terms of revenue and overall level of competition, Europe is the most prominent soccer market in
the world. Professional soccer in Europe had a total market value of US $25.5 billion in the
2016/17 soccer season. The European Union or European Football Association (UEFA) is
Europe's main governing body for soccer, overseeing club and national competitions such as the
clubs ' UEFA Champions League and the national teams ' European Championship. The UEFA
Champions League alone generated over two billion Euros of total revenue in the 2016/17 season.
Deloitte Sports Business Group's annual review of football finance found that the "big five"
leagues of Europe which are the leagues of England, Germany, Italy, Spain and France; made a
record £13.8 billion in revenue in 2017/18, which was a 6% increase from the previous year. The
demand for European football is now valued at £ 25.1 billion. The Premier League continues to
lead the way in revenue figures and is 72 per cent higher than its biggest rival, the Bundesliga
in Germany. German stadiums, however, remain the most attended in the European leagues, with
an average attendance for this current season of over 43,000

Dig:
 Evaluating actions in football using machine learning

The Twelve football app evaluates players live during the game. Unlike almost all other
ranking that claim to evaluate players, ours is based on a rigorous statistical model of how
players increase (and decrease) thier team's chance of scoring. It is based on The Twelve
points system, which is a machine learning algorithm developed by Uppsala professor and
soccer-mathematician David Sumpter (that's me!).

METHODS:
Dataset and analysis
We employ datasets comprising 45 football games by 18 teams of the top league of J League
(J1 League) second stage 2016, provided by DataStadium Inc., Japan. The DataStaduim has
been authorized to collect and sell data under a contract with the J League. This contract
also ensures that the use of relevant datasets does not infringe any rights of players and
clubs belonging to J League. The datasets are not open. We have received permission to use
them for this research from the DataStadium. The list of names of 18 teams is as follows:

''Fukuoka'',''Hiroshima'',''Iwata'',''Kashima'',''Kashiwa'',''Kawasaki'',''Kobe'',''Kofu'',''Nagoya
'',''Niigata'',''Omiya'',''Osaka'',''Sendai'',''Shonan'',''Tokyo'',''Tosu'',''Urawa'',''Yokohama''.''Fuku
oka'',''Hiroshima'',''Iwata'',''Kashima'',''Kashiwa'',''Kawasaki'',''Kobe'',''Kofu'',''Nagoya'',''Nii
gata'',''Omiya'',''Osaka'',''Sendai'',''Shonan'',''Tokyo'',''Tosu'',''Urawa'',''Yokohama''.
There are five games per team, and each of five games was taken place on Sept. 25, Oct. 1,
Oct. 22, Oct. 29, and Nov. 3 in 2016. In this paper, we refer to each game in a form such
as Sept. 25 game of "Sendai". Each dataset contains all players' absolute positions every
0.04 seconds (i.e., the frame rate is 25 fps), which are tracked automatically by multiple
cameras fixed in each stadium; the spatial resolution of the data is centimeter scale. For
simplicity, we focus on the 10 players (N = 10) other than the goalkeeper for each team and
analyze the data of the first halves of games. It is noted that we exclude several games with
player substitutions in the first half from the analysis.
 GRAPH:

How it works

We used data from hundreds of thousands of shots, passes, blocks, interceptions and every
other action performed in three seasons of the top five leagues. We then use a statistical
model to determine the value of every single match event.

Although the statistical methods are advanced, the unifying concept behind the model is
extremely simple and starts with goals. The best thing you can do in football is score a goal.
Scoring a goal gives a maximal 1,000 points.
All other points are assigned relative to goals. For attacking play (passes, dribbles, set pieces)
Twelve assigns points based on how these actions increase a team's chances of creating a goal
-scoring opportunity. To do this, we first collect all the events over many seasons of
professional football into chains of possession. This allows us to compare and evaluate similar
passes.
The pass shown above into the opposition penalty area is worth +100 points because 10% of the
times that pass is played it leads to a goal. Remember a goal is worth 1000 points, so a pass that
gives 10% of a goal is worth 100 points.

Importantly, this evaluation of passes is not based on our 'intuition' or subjective feeling about a
pass. It is based on a statistical model that accounts for tens of thousands of passes in our data
set. This is where machine learning comes in.

Passes back and forward between defenders, which seldom lead to shots, are typically worth
only +2 or +3 points. Forward passes in midfield are worth +20 or +30 points.

Defence points are assigned value based on how much they decrease the opponent's probability
of scoring and the probability the player's team is to score from a counter from the defensive
action.
Off-the-ball points are assigned to players who were within proximity of an opposition
player at the moment in which he lost the ball and control of possession was turned over to
the player's team.

Not all shots are goals. We assign points to misses and stopped shots based on the
probability that a typical shot from that position would result in a goal, this is similar to the,
so-called, expected goals model.
Expected goals, which is increasingly used by fans and coaches when talking about football, is thus
a limited case, used for dealing with shots, of our more general algorithm. The Twelve algorithm
evaluates all actions, so we can compare strikers with defenders in terms of what they contribute.

Points for each of the four categories (Attack, Defence, Off-the-Ball and Shots) are added
together to show how a player provides value to their team.

Over the last two years we have provided live rankings for Allsvenskan, Premier League, Champions
League, World Cup and Women's World Cup, which means our scores have been scrutinised by
hundreds of thousands of fans.
Overall fans (and experts) opinions usually agree with our scores, but sometimes they are the
subject of lively discussions.

Professional scouting.

We work with clubs in providing rankings that make sense for scouting. Here we use player
radars, which don't count just actions, but count the value-added to the team (in terms of points)
by the actions. These are divided in terms of attack:
Technical Details:
Twelve primarily make use of logistic regression and other supervised machine learning
methods to calculate the probability that different actions lead to a goal. Here we outline
the method we use for passes.

All the matches used to train the model are broken down into sequences of possession, i.e.,
fragments of the game during which one of the teams holds the possession of the ball
without losing the ball and without any stops in the play (due to fouls, throw-ins, offsides,
etc.). A chain was considered broken and another chain begun whenever the opposition
team made two consecutive touches of the ball.

Once all actions are allocated to a possession chain then two logistic regressions are fitted
in order to assign a value to each pass. The first regression is obtained by assigning each
 possession chain a value between 0 (if the play ends without a shot) and 1 (if the
sequence finishes with a goal).

This gives the probability of a pass (defined by its starting and ending co-ordinates on
the pitch) leading to a shot. A second regression is then used to compute the probability
of a shot leading to a goal (i.e. to obtain the expected goal value of the shot).

Multiplying these two probabilities for every shot gives the probability that a pass of with
certain starting and ending co-ordinates and qualifiers is likely to result in a goal. It is
this value which we call the pass impact.

Similar methods are used for the value of dribbles. A reverse process is then used for
tackles, headers and so based on how the action reduces the oppositions probability of
scoring.

Conculsion:
Football is played by two teams having eleven players in each. By putting ball in opposite goal
post, each team aims make to more goals than opposite team. At the end of the match, the team
scores more, becomes winner. Conclusion- This is a game which provides thrill to both the player
and the audience.

*****THE END*****