Structural Pass Analysis in Football: Learning Pass Archetypes and Tactical Impact from Spatio-Temporal Tracking Data

arXiv:2603.28916v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Football action-value approaches estimate scoring, possession, or other downstream outcome value; complementary descriptions can characterise how a pass relates to the opposition's spatial structure. We introduce an interpretable structural-passing framework using tracking and event information, with three descriptors: Line Bypass Score (LBS), a signed difference in opponents remaining goal-side between passer and receiver coordinates; Space Gain Metric (SGM), relative nearest-opponent distance at the receiver versus a floored passer reference; and Structural Disruption Index (SDI), aggregate differences in defensive-shape summaries between pass time and the nearest sampled state one second later. The metrics are transformed and standardised before combination in Tactical Impact Value (TIV), a fixed-weight structural composite. We apply the framework to 41,078 open-play pass events with identified passer and receiver from the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The selected K=4 partition provides an interpretable operational taxonomy of four profiles: Circulatory, Destabilising, Line-breaking, and Space-expanding. The profiles show different structural metric signatures, and the reported territorial-crossing and stored outcome indicators vary descriptively across profiles and TIV strata. Team, spatial, player, and passer--receiver analyses illustrate how the structural representation can be summarised at multiple levels. The findings position the framework as a complement to outcome-oriented action-value analysis, offering football analysts interpretable structural evidence to support tactical interpretation and guide further investigation.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-10-14