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Maintaining a delicate balance between organization and chaos is a key factor in maintaining a strategic advantage in conflict situations, BGU researchers said Thursday.
In "The Adaptive Behavior of a Soccer Team: An Entropy-Based Analysis", published in the October issue of Entropy, a professional journal covering all aspects of entropy and information science, Prof. Yair Neuman of the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, and his colleagues Dr. Dan Vilenchik of BGU's Department of Software and Informations Systems Engineering, Navot Israeli and Yochai Cohen, found that in order to optimize performance and remain competitive, soccer teams maintained a delicate balance between organization and disorganization on the field.
“By analyzing data from the 2015-16 English Premier League soccer season, particularly related to passes between players on the field, we found that the team needed to maintain organized patterns of behavior in order to maximize collaboration between members of the team," says Prof. Neuman, the lead researcher.
On the other hand, the team's behavior needed to be disordered enough to surprise and/or mislead an opponent. By focusing on teams' ball passing patterns we were able to show that the team's success over the course of the season correlated to the team's entropy, or lack of predictability, as measured with a super-additive entropy index."
“Moreover, the entropy score of a team significantly contributes to the prediction of the team's position at the end of the season beyond the prediction gained by the team's position at the end of the previous season," Neuman added.
The authors stressed that professional soccer presented a useful model for analysis because players employ a particularly complicated framework of internal communication vs. efforts to fool opposition players. But they added that the findings are significant across a range of academic disciplines and “real life" situations, including military and diplomatic strategy.
“It's a balancing act: Inside a group – whether it is a soccer team, a military unit or group of senior diplomats, it is important to coordinate messages and actions so individual members of the group can anticipate actions and reactions of their colleagues in a given situation.
“At the same time, the group has to ensure that its actions do not become so formulaic that opponents can easily predict their movements and actions. Away from the soccer pitch, we see this clearly from the Second Lebanon War in 2006: Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said openly that he would not have approved the abduction of three Israeli soldiers along the Israel-Lebanon border if he had anticipated an Israeli retaliatory invasion."
