ETSY: A Rule-Based Approach to Event and Tracking Data SYnchronization

Event data, which records high-level semantic events (e.g., passes), and tracking data, which records positional information for all players, are the two main types of advanced data streams used for analyses in soccer. While both streams when analyzed separately can yield relevant insights, combining them allows us to capture the entirety of the game. However, doing so is complicated by the fact that the two data streams are often not synchronized with each other. That is, the timestamp associated with an event in the event data does not correspond to the analogous frame in the tracking data. Thus, a key problem is to align these sources. However, few papers explicitly describe approaches for doing so. In this paper, we propose a rule-based approach ETSY for synchronizing event and tracking data, evaluate it, and compare experimentally and conceptually with the few state-of-the-art approaches available.