Eur. Phys. J. B 57, 357-363 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00177-4

Statistics of football dynamics

¹ Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Av. Colombo 5790, 87020-900 Maringá-Paraná, Brazil
² Departamento de Física, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, CP 38097, 22453-900 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Corresponding author: ^a celia@fis.puc-rio.br

Received: 17 January 2007
Revised: 1 June 2007
Published online: 22 June 2007

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of football matches. Our goal is to characterize statistically the temporal sequence of ball movements in this collective sport game, searching for traits of complex behavior. Data were collected over a variety of matches in South American, European and World championships throughout 2005 and 2006. We show that the statistics of ball touches presents power-law tails and can be described by q-gamma distributions. To explain such behavior we propose a model that provides information on the characteristics of football dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss the statistics of duration of out-of-play intervals, not directly related to the previous scenario.