Event Data

This chapter introduces event data, a data source used by practitioners in the intersection of sports performance analysis and computer science. Event data is a time-ordered collection of all events occurring in a sports game with enriched attributes such as the event coordinates or the action outcome. The high availability of this data and the information it includes enables a highly interpretable understanding of team interactions. It can compute advanced statistics disseminated by temporal and spatial attributes. The analysis of chains of events motivated the emergence of probabilistic models attempting a continuous evaluation of each action during a game, improving team and player evaluations in sports science.