In football leagues, a won match produces three points (all for the winner) whereas a drawn match produces only two (one for each team). Here, the total resource from the viewpoint of league points is not constant and the gain of the match for both teams changes depending on the result of the match. To cater for this situation, we propose a formulation for modelling tactical changes of formation in an association football match as a non-zero-sum game using game theory. In this paper, we focus on two well-known teams in the J. League and analyse their offensive and defensive strengths based on their formation, i.e., a combination of the number of each type of outfield player on the pitch. Using these estimated offensive and defensive strengths, we develop the mathematical formulation for analyzing tactical changes of these teams' formations from the viewpoint to increase their expected number of league points gained in a match, and quantitatively demonstrate not only the effect of the introduction of the league point system on the tactical change, but also the effect of cooperation between managers which could make both teams benefit in terms of the expected number of league points gained in a match.

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Modeling Tactical Changes of Formation in Association Football as a Non-Zero-Sum Game
Nobuyoshi Hirotsu / Masamitsu Ito / Chikara Miyaji / Koji Hamano / Azuma Taguchi
1Juntendo University
1Nippon Sport Science University
1Japan Institute of Sports Sciences
1Juntendo University
1Chuo University
Citation Information: Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. Volume 5, Issue 3, Pages –, ISSN (Online) 1559-0410, DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1138, July 2009
Publication History:
- Published Online:
- 2009-07-19
Keywords: football; formation; game theory; tactics; non-zero-sum game


















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