Identifiability of Chinese football teams: A complex networks approach

The current study proposes the use of Network Science as a complementary tool to analyse how specific and unique the playing style of Chinese football teams is. Departing from all passes made by a team during a whole season, we construct the pitch passing network of each match, where nodes are the different areas of the pitch, and the links account for the number of passes between any two areas. In this way, we obtain a network containing information about how a team moves the ball during the offensive phase of a match. For each match, we construct the pitch passing networks at different scales by using partitions of the pitch of different sizes. Next, we compare how consistent are the pitch-passing networks during a whole season and how the spatial scale affects the quantification of this consistency. Importantly, we also compare the networks of each team with the rest of the teams in the league, which allow us to obtain an identifiability parameter, which accounts for how particular the networks of a team are. Finally, we repeat the analysis during 5 consecutive seasons and detect what teams maintain their particular playing style during the years.