In order to quantify the joint actions among players in these matches, we calculated correlations between path segments of pairs of players to detect co-occurring similar motion patterns.
We analyzed high spatio-temporal resolution positional data of players and the balls from 5 official football matches between 9 different top level teams (hereafter referred to as tA to tI to preserve their anonymity), including one team that played twice (Table 1). In order to quantify the joint actions among players in these matches, we calculated correlations between path segments of pairs of players to detect co-occurring similar motion patterns. We defined highly correlated segments (HCS)