A review of spatio-temporal metrics in invasion game sports.

INTRODUCTION: A team's tactical behaviour is often quantified using metrics that relate to player locations at a given time. This spatio-temporal data is easily translated into many metrics that describe the point, line and surface relations of players and the ball over time. This study reviews the spatio-temporal metrics used in invasion game sports. METHOD: A review of six online databases provided 355 publications from which spatio-temporal metrics were extracted. RESULTS: A generalised summary of extracted metrics and metric specifications was compiled. Combining metrics and metric specifications creates all extracted metrics and some new suggestions. The compilation is presented in a table that contains the associated literature from the review as further reading. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION: Three conclusions were drawn from the review. Firstly, spatio-temporal metrics don’t suffer from the same lack of consensus on definitions as other sports performance analysis metrics. Secondly, some metrics might not be generalizable to all invasion game sports. Third, the structure of the location and time data constrains the metrics that could be used.