Defensive strategy makes soccer teams lose most matches away from home: Study

A research has revealed that coaches of visiting teams in most games have been advocating defensive-oriented strategy, which leads to less aggressive matches away from home.

Investigators at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have discovered a strategic error often made by coaches of visiting teams on matches played in other places than home by applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of professional soccer.

Patrick Lucey, a Disney researcher who specializes in automatically measuring human behavior, said the common wisdom that teams should 'win at home and draw away' has encouraged coaches to play less aggressively when their teams are on the road.

The computer analysis has suggested that it is this defensive-oriented strategy that reduces the likelihood of road wins.

Though soccer was the focus of this study, the researchers said that their techniques were applicable to other team sports that feature continuous play, including basketball, hockey and American football.

The researchers have found out that performance measures, such as shooting and passing percentage, were similar for home and visiting teams.

Every team played a more defensive and counterattacking style as the ball was more often in its opponents' defensive third and thus the team had more shots on goal, the researchers said.

Lucey said that the visiting coaches were setting up their teams for failure from the beginning because they're not preparing themselves for randomness.

The research has yielded entropy maps, which model the uncertainty of a team's behavior in different areas of the field.

Teams with high entropy spread the ball around and are harder to predict, while low entropy teams have players who tend to stay within certain areas of the field, the researchers added.

By combining these entropy maps with commonly used match statistics such as passes, shots on goal and fouls, the automated analysis can distinguish between teams with high accuracy, the researchers have found.