Networks of international football: communities, evolution and globalization of the game
Authors: Yang Li, Gonzalo Mateos
AI-generated Key Points
- Authors explore the macroscopic evolution of football society using a complex network approach
- Previous studies have utilized network science and graph-centric methods to analyze football players and teams
- Researchers collected football game records spanning over a century and represented them in a graph format
- Community detection and temporal analysis techniques are applied to uncover dynamic features and community structures within the football network
- Spatio-temporal analysis reveals distinct developmental stages in football history
- Evolution of the game is influenced by major sporting events, social incidents, and political incidents
- Football's evolution reflects significant historical transitions and turning points
- Study contributes to understanding how football has evolved as a global phenomenon over time using network science methodologies
Abstract: As the most popular sport around the globe, the game of football has recently intrigued much research interest to explore and distill useful and appealing information from the sport. Network science and graph-centric methods have been previously applied to study the importance of football players and teams. In this paper, for the first time we study the macroscopic evolution of the football society from a complex network point of view. Football game records within a time window of over a century were collected and expressed in a graph format, where participant teams are represented by graph nodes and the games between them are the graph edges. We carry out community detection and temporal analysis to reveal the dynamic features and the community structures embedded within the football network, offering the evidence of a continuously expanding football society. Spatio-temporal analysis is also implemented to unveil the temporal states that represent distinct development stages in the football history. Our analysis suggests that the evolution of the game receives considerable impact not only from major sport events, but also from multiple social and political incidents. The game of football and its evolution reflect significant historical transitions and turning points, and can provide a novel perspective for the study of the worldwide globalization process.
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