The research, which will be submitted to Scientific Reports, studied event-level records from 13,067 matches from 10 top-tier soccer leagues in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United States that occurred from 2020 to 2025. The researchers quantified the match dynamics by examining conventional performance statistics and pitch-passing networks to track ball movement across the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The research preprint is one of the first from NetSi Sport and shows other ways network science can track patterns in confined physical spaces, said Brennan Klein<\/a>, an assistant teaching professor in the department of physics and core faculty at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot we still don\u2019t really understand about networks that are embedded in some sort of three-dimensional location,\u201d Klein told Northeastern Global News. \u201cBut we can think about the techniques that really lend themselves to studying pitch passing networks and asking what is similar or dissimilar about the flows of the ball through the pitch in soccer compared to the flow of people on subways. There is a methodological core to these types of analysis that we could reverse engineer back into these other physical systems.\u201d<\/p>\n While pursuing his doctorate, Klein said Sternberg Family distinguished professor Alessandro Vespignani noticed some visuals on soccer data analysis on Klein\u2019s screen that Klein had been doing in his spare time. This inspired the idea of using soccer as a focus for NetSi Sport\u2019s first piece of research.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a great example of a sport that has sports analytics techniques,\u201d Klein added. \u201cNetwork science has had something really special to say (whether) it\u2019s a new frame of how to look at like neurons in a brain and how they connect to form consciousness or to look at airport mobility networks and see their role in epidemic spread. Any number of big questions can be seen through a network science lens. The natural next question is, \u2018what does it have to say about sports?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n With soccer, researchers could track individual player performances using a number of different metrics (such as speed and number of shots made) as well as track pairs of players and passes between them. The sport also lends itself to tracking how each individual player\u2019s actions impact the rest of the game, opening the door to what Klein said are complex system-style questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n This also all happens in a controlled environment that sets natural limits to the action.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s this undulating blob of activity that when you watch it, you can kind of see that there\u2019s some deep, rich language or pattern,\u201d he added. \u201cWith traditional quantitative tools, it\u2019s not easy to capture that. As a sport, it\u2019s an awesome test bed for a lot of these techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n Researchers combed through the plays from over 13,000 individual matches from the top five men\u2019s and women\u2019s leagues from England, Spain, Italy and Germany over the last five years. This represents one of the first large-scale assessments of soccer trends and one of the first large-scale studies of women\u2019s professional soccer.<\/p>\n The team tracked each player\u2019s actions and movements, representing each event with a color-coded dot on the pitch (such as purple for carries, gold for passes and blue for shots and fouls). This same method was used to further analyze specific moves like passes.<\/p>\n By looking at these, researchers could eventually parse out trends about individual teams and leagues as a whole.<\/p>\n![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Brennan-Klein.jpg\")
Brennan Klein, assistant teaching professor in the department of physics and core faculty member at the Network Science Institute, was part of the team behind the new research. Photo by Matthew Modoono\/Northeastern University<\/p>\n![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Maddalena-Torricelli.jpg\")
Maddalena Torricelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Network Science Institute and researcher at NetSI sport, was also involved in the research. Photo by Matthew Modoono\/Northeastern University<\/p>\n