Real-Time Crowdsourcing of Detailed Soccer Data

This article explores how spectators of a live soccer game can collect detailed data while watching the game. Our motivation arouse from the lack of free detailed sport data, contrasting with the large amount of simple statistics collected for every popular games and available on the web. Assuming many spectators carry a smart phone during a game, we implemented a series of input interfaces for collecting data in real time. In a user study, we asked participants to use those interfaces to perform tracking tasks such as locating players in the field, qualifying ball passes, and naming the player with ball while watching a video clip of a real soccer game. Our two main results are 1) the crowd can collect detailed–and fairly complex–data in real-time with reasonable quality while each participant is assigned a simple task, and 2) a set of design implications for crowd-powered interfaces to collect live sport data. We also discuss the use of such data into a system we developed to visualize soccer phases, and the design implications coming with the visual communication of missing and uncertain detailed data.