Gender Differences in Technical-Tactical Behaviour of la Liga Spanish Football Teams

[Abstract] The aim of this study was to identify differences in technical-tactical behaviour between the men and women first division football teams of the Spanish league, to this end 68 matches corresponding to 2016/17 season were analysed. A comparative analysis of the medians was carried out using the Mann-Whitney U-tests were conducted as post hoc tests. The size effect of this test was calculated and, finally, we performed a grouping of the variables through the clustering bootstrapping technique in both groups. We have detected statistically significant differences (p <0.01) regarding all accurate passes, in favour of men, as well as a greater number of yellow cards. In female football, a greater number of picking up free balls, interceptions, lost balls, recoveries and challenges are produced. Finally, in women's football a greater number of attacks are also carried out, both positional and counterattacks than in men. The clustering analysis allowed us to identify that in male football, the circumstance of receiving a red card is closely related to the number of goals conceded and most of the shots on goal are achieved by positional attacks. In the case of women's football, ball possession on own half is closely related to the number of losses. Data proves the existence of technicaltactical differences between male and female football of the La Liga teams. Such detailed analysis could be useful for gender-specific training information for optimal preparation. However, more research is warranted to establish the main gender differences and characterize women's football.We gratefully acknowledge the support of Generalitat Valenciana proyect: Análisis observacional de la acción de juego en el fútbol de élite (Consellería d´Educació, Investigació, Cultura i Esport) during the period: 2017-2019 (GV2017/044). We also acknowledge the support of Universidad Católica de Valencia “San Vicente Mártir” project: Estudios en el deporte de élite desde los Mixed Methods: técnicas de análisis de estudios comparativos, during the period 2018 [Grant UCV2017/230-002]Generalitat Valenciana; GV2017/044Universidad Católica de Valencia; UCV2017/230-00

Scheduling the Australian football league

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, such as higher attendance and TV viewership, lower costs, and increased fairness. The Australian Football League is particularly interesting because of an unusual competition format integrating a single round robin tournament with additional games. Furthermore, several teams have multiple home venues and some venues are shared by multiple teams. This paper presents a 3-phase process to schedule the Australian Football League. The resulting solution outperforms the official schedule with respect to minimizing and balancing travel distance and breaks, while satisfying more requirements

Fan Identification in Professional Sport

The purpose of this research was to find out the relationship between professional sport fans and either the team or player they most support. The goal of the research was to find out whether fans of professional sport go out to games or watch games at their house because of their support for their favorite organization or their idol player. The reason behind the research was because out of all the psychology and sociology studies surrounding professional sport, 95% of all those studies included an athlete, team, or coach. Only 5% of all those mentioned studies were involved with the fan side. It is important to understand the reasoning fans have for each of their favorite leagues and why they watch the sport they love. Sports give every fan the opportunity of escapism. Whether at the game or watching from home, each game represents a new start for each fan base to rally for a win. The method used for drawing conclusions was through an anonymous survey with participants from a small college. The sample was completed through participants from age 18-23 with a mix of 56% male and 44% female. Along with this, fandom level was also surveyed to see what kind of professional sport fans were participating. What was found only established the idea more that the NFL is by far the most popular sport league in North America, and a hypothesis before the study was ran guessing the NFL is so popular because fantasy football is so widespread and allows for so many people to watch the games. It was believed fantasy football participation led to NFL viewing. However, what was learned in the survey was that fantasy football did not play as big a role on NFL fans participating as much as anticipated prior to the beginning of the research. What is known throughout the study is that the NFL and NBA are by far the more popular leagues compared to the other professional leagues in North America. Part of that reason is due to the fact that both those leagues do an exceptional job of promoting their players through other advertisements, while other leagues like MLB have their best player not promoting themselves to their full ability

More than a Match: The Role of Football in Britain’s Deaf Community

The University of Central Lancashire has undertaken a major research project into the role of football within the deaf community in Britain. As well as reconstructing the long history of deaf involvement in football for the first time, the project has also focused on the way in which football has provided deaf people with a means of developing and maintaining social contacts within the community, and of expressing the community’s cultural values. This article will draw on primary data gathered from interviews conducted with people involved in deaf football in a variety of capacities. During the course of these interviews, a number of themes and issues emerged relating to the values and benefits those involved with deaf football place on the game, and it is these which are explored here

Spartan Daily, March 3, 1936

Volume 24, Issue 94https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2422/thumbnail.jp

Peer Motivational Climate in Youth Sport: Measurement Development and Validation

The influence of the peer group on young people’s achievement motivation has been highlighted in the literature as an area that needs examination (e.g., Harwood & Swain, 2001). To this effect, a new measure of youngsters’ perceptions of the peer motivational climate (Peer Motivational Climate in Youth Sport Questionnaire; PeerMCYSQ) was developed and tested across three studies. In Study 1, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) with 431 athletes between the ages of 11 to 16 years suggested that the PeerMCYSQ had 6 factors that could also be subsumed into 2 higher order factors (Task-Involving climate: improvement, relatedness support, effort; Ego-Involving climate: intra-team competition, normative ability, intra-team conflict). In Studies 2 and 3 the 6-factor solution and the corresponding hierarchical one were tested using CFA with two independent samples (N = 606 and 495, respectively)of similar age. The results showed that the 6-factor model was problematic and that a 5-factor solution should be preferred instead. Further support to the 5-factor model was provided with hierarchical and multilevel CFAs. Suggestions for further research on peer motivational climate are discussed

ImageSieve: Exploratory search of museum archives with named entity-based faceted browsing

Over the last few years, faceted search emerged as an attractive alternative to the traditional "text box" search and has become one of the standard ways of interaction on many e-commerce sites. However, these applications of faceted search are limited to domains where the objects of interests have already been classified along several independent dimensions, such as price, year, or brand. While automatic approaches to generate faceted search interfaces were proposed, it is not yet clear to what extent the automatically-produced interfaces will be useful to real users, and whether their quality can match or surpass their manually-produced predecessors. The goal of this paper is to introduce an exploratory search interface called ImageSieve, which shares many features with traditional faceted browsing, but can function without the use of traditional faceted metadata. ImageSieve uses automatically extracted and classified named entities, which play important roles in many domains (such as news collections, image archives, etc.). We describe one specific application of ImageSieve for image search. Here, named entities extracted from the descriptions of the retrieved images are used to organize a faceted browsing interface, which then helps users to make sense of and further explore the retrieved images. The results of a user study of ImageSieve demonstrate that a faceted search system based on named entities can help users explore large collections and find relevant information more effectively