Spatial similarity index for scouting in football

Finding players with similar profiles is an important problem in sports such as football (also known as soccer in some countries). Scouting for new players requires a wealth of information about the available players so that similar profiles to that of a target player can be identified. However, information about the position of the players in the field is seldom employed. For this reason, a novel approach based on spatial data analysis is introduced to produce a spatial similarity index that can help to identify similar players. The use of this new spatial similarity index is illustrated with an example from the Spanish competition ‘La Liga’, season 2019–2020, in which hundreds of players are clustered according to their position in the field.