| Soccer Research: Scientific Kick |
By Thomas Köster
What makes a soccer team lose a match? Can fan songs influence referees’ decisions? What effect do national soccer teams have on share prices? These are all questions that are being investigated by German scientists.
Suat Gedikli would actually have preferred to see Turkey in the final of the 2008 European Championship. However, when Germany’s soccer team played against Spain for the winning title in June 2008, Gedikli, who was born in Munich, was backing his country of birth. “Nevertheless, the Spanish team deserved to win,” says the engineer, who watched the match at home on TV. “Everybody must have been able to see that. And a computer analysis of the match would not have shown anything else.”
Gedikli should know. Recently, he completed a doctoral thesis on how soccer matches can be minutely analyzed with the help of TV broadcasts and a special software program. His thesis is part of a pilot project entitled “Automated Sport Game Analysis Model” (ASPOGAMO), in which engineers and sports scientists from Munich and Augsburg are collaborating. It involves transferring the TV images to a virtual soccer field, with the estimation of camera position, direction and zoom factor providing a virtual image of the real-world process.
The science of the art of soccer
“Basically, our aim is to implement computer systems that can understand sports matches,” says Gedikli’s doctoral adviser, Michael Beetz, from the Technical University of Munich, the initiator of the project. This involves taking other factors besides mere ball speed or individual motion trajectories into consideration—factors such as the overall game situation, including the positions of members of both teams. ASPOGAMO was first used during the World Cup final in 2006, in which Italy played France. “We tried to detect certain rules in the game,” says Beetz. The scientists discovered, for instance, what took the wind out of the sails of the French, who dominated this match, which ended in a 6-4 victory for the Squadra Azzurra. The main reason seems to have been fast cross and lead-up passes from the Italian defense that shifted the game to mid-field again and again—until, finally, the long pass came, mostly via the left attack side.
In 2007, parts of the World Cup evaluation could be seen in a video installation by artist Harun Farocki at Documenta 12 in Kassel. But for Beetz, the goal of his match research is not disinterested pleasure: desperate team managers may soon be using ASPOMAGO at halftime to help them understand how an opponent is functioning, thus enabling them to change their tactics. Even expert discussions or video conferences would then take on a new quality.
Soccer as a microscope
But the informatics experts from Munich are not the only ones to devote their attention to the art of soccer. In fact, there is hardly a university in Germany today that can afford to ignore this game. Modern soccer research is a wide field in which even humanities researchers are taking an interest: they are ascertaining, by statistical means, whether professionals perform better against amateur goalies in a penalty shoot-out (no) or whether referees are influenced in their decisions by songs and catcalls from the fan blocks (yes). Or they are investigating how national teams’ matches affect their sponsors’ share prices. “The topic is an up-and-coming one,” says Marco Runkel, a financial expert from Magdeburg, who attended a symposium with 50 soccer-mad economists in Innsbruck shortly before Euro 2008. One reason for the interest in soccer is the fact that success and failure can be clearly distinguished in sport. “The benefits a new manager brings are often unclear in industry,” adds Munich economist Stefan Wagner. “With soccer, performance can be easily gauged from the league table.”
The social sciences, in particular, have embraced the topic of soccer in order to clarify issues relating to racism, nationalism, sexism and spontaneous public viewing. A list of about 300 scientific publications dealing with historical, gender-specific, economic, philosophical or legal aspects of the 2006 World Cup (Fußballweltmeisterschaft 2006) can be found on the web site of the Sociological Information Centre (Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften) in Bonn. The preface to the collection of scientific essays entitled Serious Games: The Political Sociology of Soccer (Ernste Spiele. Zur politischen Soziologie des Fußballs, 2008) refers to soccer as a “microscope on the complex interconnections of society both on a global, transnational level and as a local, club, leisure and school sport.” The game of soccer is becoming a global model, supposedly capable of explaining all kinds of social phenomena.
The “transparent” soccer player
In some respects, soccer research has considerable advantages for elite soccer players, too. A concrete example is the newly designed Euro 2008 ball, a product of the wind tunnels of materials science: It is equipped with a “goose-bump surface” that is intended to stabilize its flight during passes and goal shots. And at the German Centre for High Performance Sport (Deutsches Zentrum für Leistungssport) in Cologne, sport scientists and condition and rehab coaches are collaborating with orthopedists, internal specialists, oculists and dentists, and with the management of Bayer 04 Leverkusen, to design a telemedical database, aimed at creating web-based athlete files that will make it possible to optimize team lineups with the help of individual players’ performance profiles and injury susceptibilities.
“Systematic recording of all interesting data is still a distant goal,” said German team physician Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt in a recent interview with E-Health-Com, a German magazine. Despite all the data-protection concerns, he is in favor of the “transparent soccer player” project—aptly named PROfit. “An electronic network could be of help to all parties concerned: players, clubs and even the national team.”
And the soccer research being carried out in Germany might even enable it to become the winner of the 2010 World Cup, too.
The author is based in Cologne and is one of the two heads of Südpol Redaktionsbüro Köster & Vierecke. In addition, he works as a journalist on cultural and scholarly subjects (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ am Sonntag, Westdeutscher Rundfunk) and as an adviser on reference works.
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