In the behavioral sciences, by contrast, a paradigm shift has occurred in the study of group behavior, shifting focus from the study of single ‘focal’ individuals to the quantitative study of simultaneous interactions among organisms, and the resulting collective properties exhibited by groups.
Historically, the analysis of football has focused on several descriptive indicators (with a preponderance to player movement characterization) and in the comparison of different single players’ performance according to different contexts [18]. In the behavioral sciences, by contrast, a paradigm shift has occurred in the study of group behavior, shifting focus from the study of single ‘focal’ individuals to the quantitative study of simultaneous interactions among organisms, and the resulting collective properties exhibited by groups. As a result of advances that allow automatic player identification and tracking [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], some recent works started to explore group behaviour analyses [24], [25], [26] (for a systematic review see [27]). These analyses mostly relied on metrics that gave overall collective scores (for example: “team centroid” - geometric mean position from all team players, or “dispersion” - an indicator of how "compact" the team is, i.e. large dispersion means players are more distant from each other) and less detailed insight to players’ individual contributions to the collective behaviour (i.e. how players coordinate with each other). Thus, and since the literature has already explored some collective indicators that result from the spatial relationships of the players, it only makes sense to move towards more fine-tuned analyses to understand the individual role of each ‘unit’ (player) on the behaviour of the remaining ‘units’ of the same system (teammates and opponents).