Brief Overview of Research and Applications Using Football Players’ Positional Data

Abstract

The recent technological advances have allowed improving the validity of available data on physiological and physical requirements of football and revealed new possibilities for understanding the tactical performance in practice and competition. This paper presents a brief overview of research and applications using football players’ positional data. Nowadays, the main technological advances are based in radio frequency systems, semi-automated video tracking systems or GPS units. Each of these systems aims to capture the players’ in-field positional data with a higher degree of accuracy and minor demands for the data analysis and interpretation. However, the majority of the available studies are using this information to quantify the physical and physiological demands of the players. Yet, given the nature of the game, these demands seem to be dependent on the team tactical behaviour. In this sense, current researches have been identifying new performance indicators, helping to improve the validity of tactical analysis. At the end, the study of multi-dimensional variables can be a further advance to refine representativeness of practice task designs and to improve the coaches’ feedback to the players.