Paper Info
Title
Networks of international football: communities, evolution and globalization of the game
Abstract
As the most popular sport around the globe, the game of football has recently intrigued much research interest to explore and distill useful and appealing information from the sport. Network science and graph-centric methods have been previously applied to study the importance of football players and teams. In this paper, for the first time we study the macroscopic evolution of the football society from a complex network point of view. Football game records within a time window of over a century were collected and expressed in a graph format, where participant teams are represented by graph nodes and the games between them are the graph edges. We carry out community detection and temporal analysis to reveal the dynamic features and the community structures embedded within the football network, offering the evidence of a continuously expanding football society. Spatio-temporal analysis is also implemented to unveil the temporal states that represent distinct development stages in the football history. Our analysis suggests that the evolution of the game receives considerable impact not only from major sport events, but also from multiple social and political incidents. The game of football and its evolution reflect significant historical transitions and turning points, and can provide a novel perspective for the study of the worldwide globalization process.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s41109-022-00498-4
Applied Network Science
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Football network, Community structure, Community detection, Network dynamics, Graph similarity, Temporal states
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
2364-8228
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
7
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yang Li1659125.00
Gonzalo Mateos200.34