A comprehensive game plan and strategic tactics are critical to winning soccer, but how much does a team’s unpredictability in moving the soccer ball around the pitch matter? In a new article published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed event data from top-tier association soccer competitions to provide insights into match analysis, player tactics and game strategy.

“Soccer is low-scoring, so a couple of moments can swing a match, and simple statistics like possession or shot counts do not always capture who performed better. Our approach measures how unpredictably and widely a team moves the ball across a match,” says Dr. Sergiy Shelyag, Associate Professor in Applied Mathematics and Data Science at Flinders University.

We found that ‘all zones count’ metric, the one that values every region of the field equally, including rarely used areas, aligns best with winning.