Characterization and analyses of dribbling actions in soccer: a novel definition and effectiveness of dribbles in the 2018 FIFA World Cup RussiaTM

Abstract

Purpose Dribbling is a significant skill in soccer, owing to its effectiveness to create opportunities for scoring, and has been analysed from different perspectives, including the development of talented players. This study proposes a more comprehensive definition than the one earlier applied, considering key elements present in other suggestions found in the literature.

Methods This study aims to validate the proposed definition, considering evaluations with experts working with events from the 2018 FIFA World Cup RussiaTM and applying our definition in the analysis of the effectiveness of dribbling actions performed by elite players. We designed a protocol to collect the opinions from experts regarding the classification of events as dribble or non-dribble. To evaluate the quality of experts’ opinions working with the novel dribbling definition, we computed the accuracy, precision, and Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient to measure the agreement between them.

Results The obtained results indicate that our definition of dribbling was clear and easily understood by the experts, which suggests that it could be useful to support soccer scouting of dribbling actions. The agreement value showed a near-perfect consensus between experts. We also analysed the effectiveness of dribbling actions considering the number of dribbles and success rates, from which we could observe that 2 CONMEBOL players performed more dribbles than the others.

Conclusions The proposed 2-dimensional graphs for assessing the effectiveness of players and teams could be a useful tool for coaches to analyse technical actions toward detecting talented players.