Probability of Successful Passes

Overview

Prob. vs. Curvature

Several factors might or might not effect the likelihood that a pass is/was successful. These include such things as the skill of the players, the pressure being applied by the defense, the length and/or duration of the pass, the familiarity of the situation, the speed of play, the curvature of the pass, etc.... This research is attempting to quantify these impact of these factors (and others).

Some of the models being developed are designed to determine the probability that a pass will be successful before the fact while others are designed to designed to determine why a pass was or wasn't successful after the fact.


Working Papers

Brause, S. and D. Bernstein (2019) "Properties of Successful Passes in Soccer", Computer Science Department, James Madison University.

Videos

These videos show a single possession of a soccer match. The offensive team is shown in purple and the defensive team is shown in gold. The offensive team is attacking the goal on the right side of the field. When an offensive player gains control of the ball, the probability that a pass to a teammate will be successful is shown as a colored line ranging from bright red (a probability of 0) to bright green (a probability of 1).

The first video shows a situation in which the defensive team is playing conservatively. One interesting aspect of this video is that many of the passes do not advance the ball towards the opposing team's goal.


The second video shows a situation in which a wide variety of different high probability, and some low probability, passes are completed.


The third video shows a situation in which the last pass was very ill-advised (i.e., had a very low probability of success).

 
The Passways Project

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