Artificial Intelligence in Performance Analysis of Football Matches and Players
Authors
Maharaja Surajmal Institute, India (India)
Article Information
DOI: 10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150700142
Subject Category: Performance
Volume/Issue: 15/7 | Page No: 1845-1849
Publication Timeline
Submitted: 2026-08-03
Accepted: 2026-08-08
Published: 2026-08-24
Abstract
Football is a widely followed sport and has developed into a major industry in which performance analysis is important for improving team tactics and player development. Artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision [1], [2], [3], machine learning, wearable sensors, and tracking technologies provide new ways to analyse matches and player performance. This review examines the use of these technologies for football performance analysis, including player and ball tracking, tactical analysis [3], [4], [5], [8], match prediction, player valuation, and health monitoring. The reviewed literature includes studies published between 2016 and 2023 and identified through Scopus, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect. The review covers methods such as YOLO, SORT, Deep SORT, convolutional neural networks, support vector machines, random forests, Naive Bayes, reinforcement learning, and wearable sensor systems. The reported results show that AI-based approaches can support real-time tracking, tactical analysis, match prediction, and health monitoring. The review also indicates that accuracy, computational requirements, data quality, and system reliability remain important challenges.
Keywords
Artificial intelligence; football analytics; computer vision; player tracking; ball tracking; machine learning; wearable sensors
Downloads
References
1. Barros RML, Coutinho D, Gonçalves B, Travassos B, Bittencourt GN, Menezes R. Computer vision techniques applied to soccer: A systematic review. Computer Vision and Image Understanding. 2017;159:16–38. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
2. Gudmundsson J, Horton M. Spatio-temporal analysis of team sports. ACM Computing Surveys. 2017;50(2):1–34. doi:10.1145/3054132. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
3. Memmert D, Lemmink KAPM, Sampaio J. Current approaches to tactical performance analyses in soccer using position data. Sports Medicine. 2017;47(1):1–10. doi:10.1007/s40279-016-0562-5. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
4. Low B, Coutinho D, Gonçalves B, Rein R, Memmert D, Sampaio J. A systematic review of collective tactical behaviours in football using positional data. Sports Medicine. 2020;50(2):343–385. doi:10.1007/s40279-019-01194-7. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
5. Decroos T, Van Haaren J, Davis J. Automatic discovery of tactics in spatio-temporal soccer match data. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. 2018. p. 223–232. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
6. Horvat T, Job J. The use of machine learning in sport outcome prediction: A review. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. 2020;10:e1380. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
7. doi:10.1002/widm.1380. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
8. Bunker RP, Thabtah F. A machine learning framework for sport result prediction. Applied Computing and Informatics. 2019;15(1):27–33. doi:10.1016/j.aci.2017.09.005. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
9. Pappalardo L, et al. A public data set of spatio-temporal match events in soccer competitions. Scientific Data. 2019;6:236. doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0247-7. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
10. Tuyls K, Omidshafiei S, Muller P, Wang Z, Connor J, Hennes D, et al. Game plan: What AI can do for football, and what football can do for AI. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. 2021;71:41–88. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
11. Beal R, Norman TJ, Ramchurn SD. Artificial intelligence for team sports: A survey. The Knowledge Engineering Review. 2019;34:e28. doi:10.1017/S0269888919000225. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
12. Rossi A, Pappalardo L, Cintia P, Iaia FM, Fernández J, Medina D. Effective injury forecasting in soccer with GPS training data and machine learning. PLoS ONE. 2018;13(7):e0201264. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
13. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0201264. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]
14. Duch J, Waitzman JS, Amaral LAN. Quantifying the performance of individual players in a team activity. PLoS ONE. 2010;5:1–7. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010937. [Google Scholar] [Crossref]