Moving the Defense — Analyst Demo

What this shows

1. 1. Rapid reorganizationFind an increase in movement relative to teammates over one second.
2. 2. Trajectory integrityExclude implausible tracking before football interpretation.
3. 3. Ball alignmentDescribe how much of that movement is oriented toward the ball.
4. 4. Off-ball contextInspect concurrent attacker movement and qualifying spatial links.

The team measure is the mean trailing two-second defender-relative path across ten outfield defenders, in metres. A large value is not a rating of defending. These are fixed review examples, not a live analysis service.

Retrospective centered smoothing needs tracking through 0.12 seconds after the displayed time. Each clip adds five seconds of visual context on either side; selected measurements still use their frozen intervals. The fixed 0–6.25 m colour ceiling affects display only; larger raw values remain unchanged. A reference percentile shown in a clip is descriptive context, not a probability or performance rating. Clip source span: 10.00 s; encoded GIF duration: 10.08 s.

Representative examples

Representative

Low-ballward movement with off-ball spatial linkage

Home · Period 2 · 5355.64 s · open play (event-derived context)

A rapid increase co-occurs with off-ball attacker movement and two qualifying spatial links. Those links describe geometry, not marking assignments or attacker influence.

Open static diagnosticOpen GIF

One-second increase

0.79 m

Selected team reorganization

2.69 m

Trajectory integrity

trajectory integrity clean

Ballward stratum

low ballward

Ballward share

0.168

Off-ball linkage

localized

Total qualifying links

2

Selected defender contributions

#1: 8.19 m · #2: 5.54 m · #3: 3.06 m

Representative

Movement oriented toward the ball

Home · Period 1 · 336.76 s · open play (event-derived context)

A rapid increase accompanied by substantial ballward movement orientation. Compare it with the low-ballward example; attacker linkage was not evaluated here.

Open static diagnosticOpen GIF

One-second increase

1.42 m

Selected team reorganization

6.46 m

Trajectory integrity

trajectory integrity clean

Ballward stratum

high ballward

Ballward share

0.730

Off-ball linkage

not evaluated

Total qualifying links

not evaluated

Selected defender contributions

#1: 12.14 m · #2: 8.79 m · #3: 8.04 m

Paper versus demo

The paper studies off-ball movement direction and localized defensive reorganization using frozen scientific evidence. This demo is a separate exploratory application. Its illustrative passages add no inferential evidence and establish no causal or tactical mechanism.

Reproduce and inspect

Repository · README · Reproduce the paper · Technical API and demo guide · Paper submission candidate

From the reviewed application checkout, build the data-free local review with:

.venv/bin/python src/run_match_reorganization_demo.py --game 2 --output-dir review-output --no-media

The API guide documents the public Metrica prerequisites and bounded media route. This static export needs only the already-verified presentation package, not tracking files. Inspect public provenance and hashes.