Artificial intelligence for assessing player partnerships in football matches

The increasing prevalence of advanced technology in sports has empowered athletes, coaches, and team management to elevate their performance and fine-tune team tactics. Notably, player collaborations have emerged as a critical factor in reshaping the dynamics of matches, yet a lack of tools for accurate partnership analysis often leads to instinct-driven decisions rather than data-based insights. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of harnessing machine learning algorithms to evaluate the significance of player partnerships in football and their potential impact on match out-comes. This study innovatively forecasts player partnership formations in live matches, demonstrating adept management of extensive, unstructured datasets to create a robust solution. It offers valuable insights for coaches to predict and build effective player partnerships, resulting in sustainable advantages for the team. The research utilizes machine learning techniques, including Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), K-nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), and Random Forest (RF) classifiers. These models were applied and evaluated to construct models and assess player partnerships. Necessary data was sourced from the Kaggle dataset, which encompasses information on 167,798 player assists from 9,074 European league football matches spanning six seasons across five leagues. Machine learning models underwent training and evaluation through an 80 − 20 data split and further verified through cross-validation to ensure robustness across league datasets. Balanced sampling and k-fold cross-validation were used to mitigate data imbalance and validate model generalization. Notably, the SVM, DT and RF models demonstrated impressive accuracy of 99%, with the highest F1-score of 0.99, encompassing all football leagues. The SVM and RF models also achieved the highest precision, at 0.99, albeit with a relatively longer computation time of up to 60 s. Model performance varied marginally across leagues (± 0.3% standard deviation in accuracy and F1-score), indicating stable predictive behaviour across gameplay variations. Unlike prior studies that analyzed team synchronization or motion dynamics, this work uniquely models player partnerships based on assist-goal frequency patterns and forecasts their continuity across matches using machine learning classifiers. This study provides valuable insights for devising strategies that can confer a competitive edge in matches. The findings offer a practical means for team managers and coaches to make well-informed decisions regarding player partnerships.