Parking the bus

Abstract This paper explores defensive play in soccer. The analysis is predicated on the assumption that the area of the convex hull formed by the players on a team provides a proxy for defensive style where small areas coincide with a greater defensive focus. With the availability of tracking data, the massive dataset considered in this paper consists of areas of convex hulls, related covariates and shots taken during matches. Whereas the pre-processing of the data is an exercise in data science, the statistical analysis is carried out using linear models. The resultant messages are nuanced but the primary message suggests that an extreme defensive style (defined by a small convex hull) is negatively associated with generating shots.