Normalizing Acceleration and Power in Elite Soccer With Acceleration-Speed Profiles: A Case Study of Game Segment,...

Area of Science:

• Sports Science
• Biomechanics
• Performance Analysis

Background:

• Acceleration-speed (AS) profiling offers a new method to assess soccer players' maximal running capacity without specific sprint tests.
• Understanding player effort variations based on match context (e.g., scoreline) is crucial for tactical analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how normalizing player effort using AS profiles reveals distinct patterns of change compared to non-normalized values.
• To examine these effort patterns under different goal differential conditions and across various player positions.

Main Methods:

• AS profiles were derived from global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data of a women's national soccer team over three seasons.
• Acceleration and power data were categorized into speed domains (low, moderate, high, very high) using normalized and non-normalized metrics.
• Linear mixed models were employed for statistical analysis of both normalized and non-normalized data.

Main Results:

• Both normalized and non-normalized data indicated increased effort when drawing or winning in the first half, and sustained effort when losing or drawing throughout the match.
• Differences in effort patterns were more pronounced at high-to-very-high speeds for normalized data and moderate-to-low speeds for non-normalized data.

Conclusions:

• Individual AS and power profiles are valuable for normalizing effort, enabling the study of player and position-specific variations.
• This approach uncovers significant positional behaviors related to game states (draw, losing, winning) across halves.