Seminar: Passing Networks in Football: Current Approaches and Future Directions

ΚΥΚΛΟΣ ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΩΝ ΣΤΑΤΙΣΤΙΚΗΣ 2026-2027

Speaker: Roberto Rondinelli, Junior Assistant Professor of Statistics, Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II

Room 401: Evelpidon 47Α & Lefkados 33 str., 4th floor

Passing Networks in Football: Current Approaches and Future Directions

ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗ

Passing networks offer a relational perspective on football, providing tools to investigate how interactions between players contribute to the collective organisation of a team. By capturing the connections established through ball circulation, they support the characterisation of playing styles, the analysis of space utilisation, and comparisons across teams and matches. Their study complements conventional performance indicators by examining how actions are connected and distributed within the team. These questions are explored through different representations of passing networks. At the player level, passes aggregated over an entire match have been used to investigate team structures and patterns of interaction. At the spatial level, event data and passing sequences have been used to construct networks between pitch zones, shifting the focus from individual players to the organisation of ball circulation across the field. Although built from detailed match events, these networks have so far been analysed as static structures. These approaches provide complementary views of team organisation and raise methodological questions concerning network construction, comparison, and interpretation. Research trajectories include incorporating the chronological order of match events into the analysis and exploring networks based on distances between players, extending the investigation of passing patterns to the sequences of actions and spatial configurations in which they develop.