Masayoshi Kurihara (M2), Ryosuke Yamada (B4), and Associate Professor Takashi Shimada from the Department of Systems Innovation, received Best award in 2025 Sports Data Science Competition

On 11th January 2026, Masayoshi Kurihara (M2), Ryosuke Yamada (B4), and Associate Professor Takashi Shimada from the Department of Systems Innovation, received Best award in 2025 Sports Data Science Competition (Soccer Category).

2025 Sports Data Science Competition Best Award (Soccer Category)
The Sports Data Science Competition, organized by the Sports Data Science Section of the Japan Statistical Society, is a sports data analytics competition open to teams of students and faculty members. This year’s football category attracted a record number of around 49 teams, among which the Best Prize was awarded. The team from the Shimada group also won the best prize two years ago (Kinoshita and Kurihara) and last year (Kinoshita, Kurihara, and Hayashi), achieving a remarkable three consecutive wins.

About awarded research
"Analyzing the Effects of Positional Interchange on Attacking and Defensive Performance in Football"
Masayoshi Kurihara, Ryosuke Yamada, and Takashi Shimada

Football (soccer) is a sport in which the placement of 11 players on the pitch has a crucial importance. Such placement is defined by a combination of information regarding “where” players are positioned and “who” occupies each position. In our previous studies, we proposed a method for evaluating player positioning from the perspective of "where", using path integral method, and demonstrated that this approach effectively explains the outcomes of game situations. However, in modern football, frequent positional interchanges, where the "who" aspect becomes particularly important, have emerged as a major tactical trend. In this study, we applied the concept of "chirality" to quantitatively measure the degree of positional interchange and evaluated its impact on the outcomes of game situations. The proposed method was shown to effectively capture team-specific characteristics, and it revealed that the importance of positional interchange differs between counter-attacking phases and possession-based attacking phases. By combining the results of this study with our previous findings, we have made it possible to simultaneously evaluate both the "where" and "who" aspects of player positioning.

Your impression & future plan

M.Kurihara:

I am deeply honored to receive such a prestigious award once again, following our achievements two years ago and last year. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Yamada, with whom I worked closely on this research; to Professor Shimada for his continual guidance; and to Mr. Keigo Kinoshita, a senior colleague who has generously provided advice even after his graduation. Compared with the path-cost models proposed in previous years, the method introduced in this study is computationally light and easier to apply in real-world settings. I hope that these findings will one day be put to practical use in football.

R.Yamada:

I am truly delighted to receive such an honorable award. Building upon the studies conducted over the past two years on evaluating player positioning in football, we were able to obtain meaningful and insightful results. Working on this research together with Professor Shimada and Mr. Kurihara was an extremely valuable and rewarding experience for me. I would like to make use of this experience in my future research endeavors.