Midfielder as the prominent participant in the building attack: A network analysis of national teams in FIFA World Cup 2014

Filipe Manuel Clemente, Fernando Manuel Lourenço Martins, P. Del Wong, Dimitris Kalamaras and Rui Sousa Mendes

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2015, vol. 15, issue 2, 704-722

Abstract: This study aimed to analyze the most prominent players’ positions that contributed to the build of attack in football during FIFA World Cup 2014. The connections among teammates in all matches of the tournament were analyzed, and the tactical lineup and players’ positions of players were codified as independent variables. Four centrality network metrics were used to identify the pertinence of each players’ position. A total of 37,864 passes between teammates were recorded. Each national team was analyzed in terms of all their matches, thus all 64 matches from the FIFA World Cup 2014 tournament were analyzed and codified in this study. A total of 128 adjacency matrices and corresponding network graphs were generated and used to compute the centrality metrics. Results revealed that the players’ position (p = 0.001; η2p = 0.143; Power = 1.00; moderate effect size) showed significant main effects on centrality measures. The central midfielders possessed the main values in all centrality measures in the majority of analyzed tactical lineups. Therefore, this study showed that independent of the team strategy, the players’ position of a central midfielder significantly contributed to the build of attack in football, for example, greater cooperation and activity profile.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24748668.2015.11868825 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rpanxx:v:15:y:2015:i:2:p:704-722

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPAN20

DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2015.11868825

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport is currently edited by Peter O'Donoghue

More articles in International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().