Soccer players behave as if the ball pulls on them, and the pull hardly weakens with distance. A researcher at Hokkaido University and the University of Osaka measured it in tracking data from 10 professional matches.
Gravity grows weaker the farther away you are. The ball's pull does not. That makes a match look less like planets around a star and more like objects drifting through thick liquid under a steady force, the paper argues.
Measuring the pull
Oliver B. Wright used public tracking data from seven Bundesliga games and three anonymized matches from the analytics company Metrica Sports. The data gives every player's position 25 times a second.
For each player, he measured how much of their movement pointed toward the ball. Goalkeepers, set pieces and the player closest to the ball were left out.
A steady 0.9 meters per second
On average, players drifted toward the ball at 0.89 meters per second, about 40 percent of a typical running speed. From 15 to 65 meters away, the pull stayed almost flat at about 0.9 meters per second.
Roles showed up in the data. Defenders had a weak spot at about 12 meters, where they hold position rather than close in. Near the goals the effect even turned slightly negative, mostly because defenders drop back.
The study is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. Ten matches show the pattern clearly enough to measure.
