Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

WordPress Blog posts by miguelpdl.

Top Assister Womens World Cup 2019

March 15th, 2021

As an alternative update to the the first challenge were the Mens World Cup 2018 data was looked at, this time it’s a view of the Womens World Cup 2019.

Again I’m going to look at players that assist a goal and at a glance there was one clear player with the most goal assists at this World Cup 2019, that’s Sherida Spitse from the Netherlands, according to Wikipedia, when I head to another site there is a 2 player tie, both with 4 assists so I’m off again to see what the data highlights.

There’s a fantastic FIFA Technical Report on the Womens World Cup 2019, and while there’s fine details on loads of aspects of the games , the one thing it doesn’t cover is a easy table to see the player with the most assists.

So back to the code base, and using the same code base from the previous challenge the top three that popped out were:

  1. Megan Rapinoe (USA) : 21
  2. Amel Majri (France) : 17
  3. Sherida Spitse (Netherlands) : 16

What actions did they perform

Megan Rapinoe was top of the class with 21 passes that lead to a shot on goal.

Figure 1: Megan Rapinoe passes that assisted a shot on goal

So not only was Rapinoe the Golden Boot winner with six goals, tying with Alex Morgan (6 goals) and Ellen White (6 goals), she also had three assists in the tournament, also tied with Morgan (3 assists), and finally captured the Golden Boot for top scorer on the second tiebreaker, doing it with fewer minutes played than Morgan. Her six goals and three assists also saw her win the Golden Ball as the best player in the tournament.

Figure 2: Expected goals from Megan Rapinoe passes

Clearly Rapinoe was involved in so much of the attacking actions of the USA team, and deserved the accolades it is only lightly worth noting that a number of Rapinoes actions were from set plays (corners and the like).

But this specific write up as about the top assistor, and the next player to look at in the category is Amel Majri of France.

Figure 3: Expected goals from Amel Majri passes

Majri was a left back in the French squad, but wore the number 10 shirt and certainly represented the creative flare of that shirt with 17 passes that lead to a shot on goal. It is also quite noticeable that Majri was very consistent as to where a ball into the box would be placed, a dream for the attacking 3 of France to predict.

However the award for top assistor in the Woman’s World Cup 2019 rightly goes to Sherida Spitse of the Netherlands, with 16 passes that lead to a shot on goal, of which 4 were goals.

Figure 4: Expected goals from Sherida Spitse passes

Spitse played as a right sided defensive (pivot) midfield player for the Netherlands, and here are video clips of all of Spitse assists. This first one is from a special tactic camera.
Of note there are a number of the Womens World Cup matches covered by tactic cameras.

Spitse (Netherlands) assist for a goal in the match Netherlands vs. Canada – Thursday June 20, 2019

Spitse (Netherlands) assist for a goal in the match Netherlands vs. Japan – Tuesday June 25, 2019

First assist for Spitse (Netherlands) in the match Italy vs. Netherlands – Saturday June 29, 2019

Second assist for Spitse (Netherlands) in the match Italy vs. Netherlands – Saturday June 29, 2019

According to Squawka Sherida Spitse was the set-piece specialist of World Cup 2019

FWWC 2019 – Set-piece specialist World Cup 2019 Sherida Spitse

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Plotting actions on a pitch

February 14th, 2021

Purpose

The second element to work on via this course is Plotting actions on a pitch and the purpose is to

  • Loading match data and finding all the shots
  • Plotting shots on the pitch and highlighting goals.
  • Plotting expected goals
  • Plotting passes

The code needed for this lecture is also available at the Github SoccermaticsForPython repo.

Set up

Under the organisation on Github called mmoffoot I used my fork of the SoccermaticsForPython repo into the mmoffoot area.

Then re-used the branch called ‘week1’ covering the changes I had made as of week1 of the course.

As mentioned before I placed the StatsBomb data in a directory higher and then just add a soft link to the source data within the ‘Statsbomb’ folder of this project.

What was coded

This second exercise concentrated on the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019 match and the exercise asked that I :

  1. Create a dataframe of passes which contains all the passes in the match.
  2. Plot the start point of every Sweden pass. Attacking left to right.
  3. Plot only passes made by Caroline Seger (she is Sara Caroline Seger in the database)
  4. Plot arrows to show where the passes went

I made the code changes to 2PlotShotsAndPasses.py and run the code as

python3 2PlotShotsAndPasses.py

The output from this exercise were mainly images, which was nice.

The code provided from the original repo had shots and goals defined for display, and also a nice feature where the size of the circle represented the expected goal (xG) rating of the shot, as calculated by StatsBomb. This xG thing is covered in more depth a little later in the course, but in general terms my understanding is that xG is the probability of that shot being a goal, the higher the xG the more likely that should should have been a goal.

Therefore in the plot, a solid colour with a name is a goal and the less visable circles are shots that were taken but did not end up as a goal.

Figure 1: Shots and Goals England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

I have a thing about the pitch being green, with markings as white, so that was the one code change I made to this original code. This caused a slight issue with the goals scored by England as they played in white, I made their shots in white and the penalty spot is white. All of this means that it looks like a goal was scored by England from the penalty spot, but the goal scorer is not named. For now I think I’ll leave it as is.

As for the football analysis, there’s 6 shots on goal from within the box for Sweden, with 2 of those chances having a high xG, but were not goals, and one of the goals scored by Eva Jakobsson looks like it was a tough chance to convert, but she managed it. England only had 4 shots on goal from within the box, and even had a chance with a larger xG but didn’t score from it.

Originating Passes

Next up, the creation of a dataframe of passes was relatively straight forward as the StatsBomb data provides a ‘type_name’ of Pass within the data set so they were easy enough to extract. So the first real plot I have ever created is all the originating position of passes of the match for both Sweden and England, with Sweden playing from left to right. Also added a little text at the bottom to highlight the data came from StatsBomb.

Figure 2: Originating Position of Passes in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

That image is a bit of a mess, as in hard to offer any football analysis, so here’s just the Swedish passes.

SWEpasses
Figure 3: Originating Position of Passes in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

Now this is a little bit more interesting, no passes by Sweden in with the opposition box.

Passes made by Caroline Seger

Next up, passes made by Caroline Seger (she is Sara Caroline Seger in the database), and for this filtering out by ‘player_name’ is not too hard with the StatsBomb data.

SWEpassesSCS
Figure 4: Originating Position of Passes by Caroline Seger (SWE) in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

Given the plot, there is a lot of midfield play by Caroline Seger and of course the next step of plotting arrows to show where the passes went would really add context to this play.

Now to verify that the code I have written for the directional arrows is correct I went searching for video footage of the match, and low and behold, on YouTube there are a set of full match videos for the Womens World Cup 2019 taken from the tactical camera from behind one of the goals. Thankfully the England vs Sweden match is up there too. Now I found it really hard to pick out Caroline Seger, but I did find it easier to identify Rut Hedvig Lindahl, the Swedish goal keeper, and therefore I picked minute 11 (at random) to see if I could correlate the pass on the video and the pass on my plotted pitch.

passRHL
Figure 5: Match footage of pass by Rut Hedvig Lindahl (SWE) in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

At this very period, this action was a throw out pass by Rut Hedvig Lindahl, so quite distinctive.

SWEpassesdirectionRHL
Figure 5: Plot of pass by Rut Hedvig Lindahl (SWE) in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

And from my code. Well there was a little gashing of teeth. The tutorial video that goes with this session indicated a different result, with code that was slightly different but thankfully this was corrected by the lecturer at a later date, and therefore I was on the right track. Just goes to show obtaining some sort of footage from a match can help with these things.

So finally we have the plot I was looking for in this whole session.

Figure 4: Passes by Caroline Seger (SWE) in the England vs Sweden Womens World Cup 2019.

 

From a football analysis view point Caroline Seger was mentioned in the Swedish line up as taking up the Left Defensive Midfield position, and the passes she made show she did indeed play that role, with a preference to progress the ball towards the opposition goal, with one incisive ball into the opposition box.

What was learned

The main take aways, it was great to learn how plotting the direction of the pass with arrows for a player is important, along with verifying a few of the passes via match footage, if at all possible. I know not all matches will have the tactical camera, but more often than not for the higher tier matches there’s footage of a goal or two to be found.

Post Update:

Thanks to Mike for reviewing the content and for rightly pointed out that I had the wrong image in place for the directional passes of Caroline Seger, and the coordinates for England passes was slightly off. Images and associated code have been updated.

 

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