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Explaining the difference between men and women football

Women's football is gaining supporters and practitioners worldwide, raising questions about what the differences are with men's football. While the two sports are often compared based on the players' physical attributes, we analyze the spatio-temporal events during matches in the last World Cups to compare male and female teams based on their technical performance. We train an artificial intelligence model to recognize if a team is male or female based on variables that describe a match's playing intensity, accuracy, and performance quality. Our model accurately distinguishes between men's and women's football, revealing crucial technical differences, which we investigate through the extraction of explanations from the classifier's decisions. The differences between men's and women's football are rooted in play accuracy, the recovery time of ball possession, and the players' performance quality. Our methodology may help journalists and fans understand what makes women's football a distinct sport and coaches design tactics tailored to female teams.

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Accessibility Both
AccessibilityMode Download
Availability On-Line
Basic rights Download
CreationDate 2021-03-01 16:10
Creator Rossi, Alessio, alessio.rossi2@gmail.com, orcid.org/0000-0002-6400-5914
Field/Scope of use Research only
Group Health Studies
Owner Rossi, Alessio, alessio.rossi2@gmail.com, orcid.org/0000-0002-6400-5914
ProgrammingLanguage Python
RelatedPaper arXiv:2101.01662
Sublicense rights No
Territory of use World Wide
Thematic Cluster Other
system:type Method
Management Info
Field Value
Author Rossi Alessio
Maintainer Rossi Alessio
Version 1
Last Updated 12 September 2023, 09:15 (CEST)
Created 1 March 2021, 16:20 (CET)