Keigo Kinoshita (M1) and Masayoshi Kurihara (B4), Department of Systems Innovation, receied the first prize at Sports Data Science Competition 2023 (Football)

On 7th January 2024, Keigo Kinoshita (M1) and Masayoshi Kurihara (B4), Shimada Lab., Department of Systems Innovation, receied the first prize at Sports Data Science Competition 2023 (Football).

(Left) Masayoshi Kurihara,  (Right) Keigo Kinoshita

Sports Data Science Competition2023 (Football)

Sports Data Science Competition is a competition organized by the sectional committee of sports data science, the Japan Statistical Society. The competition this for football data analysis had 39 applications.

About awarded research

Football is a sport in which the positioning of the eleven players on the pitch has extreme importance. In this study, we tried to quantify the quality of the positioning of players in attacking situations. For this, we focused on transition events (i.e. switching between offense and defense). By modeling the difficulty of counter-attacking by the path-integral of the field formed by the players, we succeeded in quantifying the quality of the positioning of players during the attack.

Your impression & future plan

Keigo Kinoshita: I am very pleased to receive such a prestigious award, but what we have accomplished is only a small part of our goal. Ultimately, I would like to create a metric that can be used to evaluate the positioning in other phases of the game. I would like to continue the research by utilizing my domain knowledge, and keeping in mind the perspective of how it can be applied in the real field.

Masayoshi Kurihara: I feel very honored to receive this prestigious award. I am very grateful to Professor Shimada for his precise suggestions and guidance. On the basis of the results and what I have learned in this competition, I will continue to work even harder to understand football as a complex system, and to propose more effective indicators.

Shimada Lab.: Link