Flow motifs in soccer: What can passing behavior tell us?

Passing is an important and crucial aspect of winning a soccer match. It plays a big role in important decisions made by managers and owners when buying/selling players, picking offensive/defensive strategies and defining a style of play. In this article we show how to support these decisions by analyzing the unique passing behaviors (motifs) of players and teams from the patterns in their passing-possession data. We analyze individual players as well as teams based on the diversity and frequency of their involvement in different motifs. We gather passing and possession data from 4 seasons (2012–15) of 6 big European leagues with 8219 matches, 3532 unique players and 155 unique teams and apply the network motif concept to study the patterns. By introducing an expected goals model we build on the motif concept to measure the effectiveness of styles of play. We also make use of a novel way to represent the motif data (the radar graph) to make comparisons between players and teams across multiple seasons. We show how this analysis can support scouting for players and managers, identifying unique players/teams, finding relationships between position and style and in finding a suitable replacement for La Computadora.