Right Move, Right Time: Multi-Sport Space Evaluation Platform for Ultimate Frisbee, Basketball, and Soccer
An open, sport-agnostic AI platform turns player tracking data into comparable spatial metrics for coaches.
A team of researchers, including Shunsuke Iwashita, Titouan Jeannot, and Keisuke Fujii, has introduced a novel AI-powered platform titled 'Right Move, Right Time.' Published on arXiv, this open-source system provides a standardized workflow for analyzing player tracking data across invasion sports like Ultimate Frisbee, basketball, and soccer. Its core innovation is being sport-agnostic; it transforms disparate positional data into comparable spatial measures, allowing coaches to evaluate 'usable space' on the field or court and determine the optimal timing for initiating off-ball runs.
The platform uses Ultimate Frisbee as a primary testbed due to its continuous flow and complex spatial dynamics, then successfully demonstrates transferability to basketball and soccer. By creating a common analytical language, the tool enables coaches to reuse the same spatial evaluation logic—such as timing-aware metrics for player movement and space creation—across different sports. This represents a significant step toward consistent, cross-sport tactical analysis, moving beyond sport-specific silos. The 23-page paper details the methodology and illustrates its practical application, offering a new lens for data-driven coaching and player development in team sports.
- Open-source, sport-agnostic platform standardizes spatial analysis from player tracking data across Ultimate, basketball, and soccer.
- Answers the universal coaching question of identifying 'usable space' and optimal timing for off-ball offensive runs.
- Demonstrates transferability by using Ultimate as a testbed before applying the same analysis framework to basketball and soccer.
Why It Matters
Provides coaches with a unified, data-driven framework to analyze tactics and player movement, enabling cross-sport learning and more objective performance evaluation.