Using Network Science to Analyse Football Passing Networks: Dynamics, Space, Time, and the Multilayer Nature of the Game

Abstract

Once the network is constructed, several “topological scales” can be identified inside the passing network of a football team: (i) the microscale, where the analysis is carried out at the level of nodes, i.e., the players and its role inside the network, (ii) the mesoscale, which ranges from small motifs describing the interaction between 3 or 4 players to the detection of larger groups of players that interact most frequently between them and (iii) the macroscale, which considers the network as a whole. At the topological microscale, the importance of each player has been related to: its degr