Common and Unique Network Dynamics in Football Games

Yuji Yamamoto and Keiko Yokoyama

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 12, 1-6

Abstract: The sport of football is played between two teams of eleven players each using a spherical ball. Each team strives to score by driving the ball into the opposing goal as the result of skillful interactions among players. Football can be regarded from the network perspective as a competitive relationship between two cooperative networks with a dynamic network topology and dynamic network node. Many complex large-scale networks have been shown to have topological properties in common, based on a small-world network and scale-free network models. However, the human dynamic movement pattern of this network has never been investigated in a real-world setting. Here, we show that the power law in degree distribution emerged in the passing behavior in the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final and an international “A” match in Japan, by describing players as vertices connected by links representing passes. The exponent values are similar to the typical values that occur in many real-world networks, which are in the range of , and are larger than that of a gene transcription network, . Furthermore, we reveal the stochastically switched dynamics of the hub player throughout the game as a unique feature in football games. It suggests that this feature could result not only in securing vulnerability against intentional attack, but also in a power law for self-organization. Our results suggest common and unique network dynamics of two competitive networks, compared with the large-scale networks that have previously been investigated in numerous works. Our findings may lead to improved resilience and survivability not only in biological networks, but also in communication networks.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029638 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 29638&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0029638

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029638

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().