The Dutch Soccer Team as a Social network
article
Although being very popular all around the globe, soccer has not received much attention from the scientific community. In this paper we will study the Dutch Soccer Team from the perspective of complex networks. In the DST network every node corresponds to a player that has played an official match for the Dutch Soccer Team. A node is connected with another node if both players have appeared in the same match. The aim of this paper is to study the topological properties of the Dutch Soccer Team network. The motivation for studying the DST network is twofold. The first reason is the immense popularity of the DST, in the Netherlands. Through our study we obtain all kind of new statistics about the DST. Secondly, our results could also be used by the coach of the DST, for instance by determining the optimal line-up. Using data available from a public website we have computed the topological metrics for the DST. Furthermore, we have looked at the evolution of the topological metrics over time and we compared them with those of other real-life networks and of generic network models. We found that the DST is a small world network and that the player with the highest degree also has the lowest clustering coefficient.
TNO Identifier
462692
Source
Connections, 29(April), pp. 4-14.
Pages
4-14