BODY ORIENTATION / BODY SHAPE

“Analyzing the benefits of a crucial, but easily overlooked trait.“

Individual Soccer Player Tactical Body Orientation (Player Body Shape) is the soccer player’s orientation of the body in relation to the ball, the player’s prioritized situational role within the formation, and the player’s Body Orientation in relation to the specific Phase of Play being analyzed. Proper Body Orientation enables futbol players to properly see the game, read the game, understand the game, anticipate the game, and proactively respond to the game, which significantly improves and accelerates Player Development over the life cycle of the player’s career, greatly improves the cognitive ability (decision making ability), and drastically improves the Speed of Play.

BODY ORIENTATION PHRASES TO REMEMBER

• Body Orientation: Pass. Check. Move. Ready.
• Body Orientation: Open Your Body to the Opportunity: to See (player vision), Receive (the ball from a pass), Distribute (meaning to pass the ball), and Move to Create opportunities to retain possession while moving the ball forward for a shot on goal.
• Body Orientation: If You Cannot See the Play, You Cannot Read the Play. If You Cannot Read the Play, You Cannot Anticipate the Play. If You Cannot Anticipate the Play, You Are Reacting to the Play. And as such, Your Opponent Owns the Initiative and thereby Owns Your Game.

NOTES: (Triple) Threat Position, Open Hips

SOCCER BODY ORIENTATION VIDEOS

Without The Ball: How to Use Your and Your Opponent’s Body Orientation

Coach Base: Barcelona football style of play – Soccer Body Orientation

Using Player’s Body-Orientation to Model Pass Feasibility in Soccer

Futsal Movement – Body shape when receiving the ball

BODY ORIENTATION STUDIES

• Using Player’s Body-Orientation to Model Pass Feasibility in Soccer – Academic Study PDF Download
  Pep Guardiola, current Manchester City’s soccer coach and former Futbol Club Barcelona’s, said once that elder people claim that in yesteryear soccer you had to control the ball, then look and turn around, and finally, make the pass, while in today’s faster version of soccer, players need first to look (and orient correctly) before controlling and passing the ball. Therefore, getting orientation metrics may help coaches to boost the performance of a team by designing optimal tactics according to players’ strengths and weaknesses. However, the concept of orientation is a complex concept without an exact definition, and during a soccer game, there are a total of/up to 22 players oriented in their own way at any given time during 90 minutes. In order to avoid the so-called concept of paralysis by analysis, in this paper soccer events are filtered, hence including just pass events, which are the ones in where orientation takes the most important role according to Guardiola’s words. The main contribution of this research is a computational model that, for each pass event, outputs the feasibility of receiving the ball for each potential candidate of the offensive team. The proposed model combines three different types of feasibility measures, defined on the grounding assumption that, among all potential receivers, the passer will move the ball to the (a) best oriented, (b) less defended and (c) closest available player. Orientation is obtained through a Computer Vision state-of-the art method [1], which outputs an orientation value for each player by projecting the upper torso pose parts in a 2D field. On top of these data, a novel feasibility measure is introduced to describe how good/bad the orientation fit between a passer and a potential receiver is. Given the location of all defenders, another feasibility metric is defined to establish how tough it is for the passer to move the ball to a particular player; this metric takes into account the distance of all defenders with respect to the passing line, which is defined by the relative angle in the 2D field that joins the passer and the receiver. Finally, pairwise distances among offensive players are used to construct a third feasibility measure based on the separation between players, hence assuming that players close to the ball have higher chances of receiving it than farther ones.
• Importance of body orientation in football featuring Busquets, Pedri, and Thiago – Barca Universal
  Analyzing the benefits of a crucial, but easily overlooked trait. The margins between top footballers – at least on a technical level – are very thin. After years of practice and ball mastery, many players can play the same pass from one point to another, many players can take a good first touch, and so on. Yet, at the same time, we are able to tell that certain players are much better at progressive passing than others, or that some players are much more comfortable between the lines. One factor that plays a major role in these differences is body orientation, despite the fact that it can tend to be swept under the rug. Essentially, body orientation is how a player positions themselves physically – not in terms of location in the pitch, but how they set up their body itself. This involves details like the direction the player is facing, where they are looking, and the type of stance they are in. Players on either end of a pass is what we will focus on here, as this tends to be the most important area in Barcelona’s system. This is reflected by the fact that many Barça players or La Masia products excel in their orientation when passing or receiving the ball.