Visualizing game dynamics at a specific time: Influence of the players’ poses for tactical analyses in padel

Tactical elements are crucial in team sports. The analysis of hypothetical game situations greatly benefits from positional diagrams showing where the players are. These diagrams often show the layout of the players through simple symbols, which provide no information about their poses. This paper investigates if the visualization of player poses is benefitial for tactical understanding of positional diagrams in padel. We propose a realistic, cartoon-like representation of the players and discuss its integration into a typical positional diagram. To overcome the cost of generating player representations depicting their pose, we propose a method to generate such representations from minimal user input. We conducted a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of our pose-aware diagrams. The tasks for the study were designed to encompass the main in-game scenarios in padel, which include the ballholder at the net with opponents defending, the reverse situation, and transitions between these two states. We found that our representation is preferred over a symbolic one that only indicates player orientation. The proposed method enables coaches to produce such representations within a matter of seconds, thereby significantly facilitating the creation of detailed and easily analyzable depictions of game situations. • In team sports, most positional diagrams show the layout of the players through symbols providing no information about the players’ poses. • Focusing on padel, we argue that players’ poses are relevant for decision-making processes, and thus might be beneficial for positional diagrams. • We designed a user study to investigate if player poses are helpful for tactical understanding of positional diagrams compared to conventional representations that omit players’ poses. • The study incorporates diagrams showcasing examples of the primary in-game scenarios identified through cluster analysis, and demonstrates that padel enthusiasts perceive diagrams conveying player poses to be more useful. • We propose a new method that allows coaches to synthesize realistic representations of padel players at a specific pose by just providing a few intuitive parameters, making pose-aware diagrams easy to generate.