RSSeNEWS to be determined...

Researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago plan to use World Cup 2010 statistics published by Fifa to identify the world's best footballer.

Portugese born Luís Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern, and Jordi Duch, assistant professor of applied math and computer science at Universitat Rovira I Virgili in Spain, have developed a model that quantifies players' performance by generalising methods from social network analysis.

Working with complex systems graduate Joshua Waitzman they used the model to analyse detailed statistics on the flow of the ball between players and shooting information from the 2008 UEFA Champions League Cup. Now Fifa is publishing detailed statistics from all the matches in the 2010 tournament and Amaral intends to feed these into the model.

Amaral explained that one of the problems in determining who really is the best player is that "in soccer there are relatively few big things that can be counted ... You can count how many goals someone scores, but if a player scores two goals in a match, that's amazing. You can really only divide two or three goals or two or three assists among, potentially, eleven players. Most of the players will have nothing to quantify their performance at the end of the match."

His solution was to "define a network in which the elements of the network are your players ...Then you have connections between the players if they make passes from one to another. Also, because their goal is to score, you can include another element in this network, which is the goal."

The researchers looked at the way in which the ball can travel and finish on a shot. "The more ways a team has for a ball to travel and finish on a shot, the better that team is. And, the more times the ball goes through a given player to finish in a shot, the better that player performed," said Amaral.