Dissertation (May 04, 2026): Balthazar da Silva Cunha Paixão
Student: Balthazar da Silva Cunha Paixão
Title: Analisando a Robustez de Redes de Passes em Futebol usando Redes Complexas
Advisor: Glauco Fiorott Amorim
Committee: Glauco Fiorott Amorim (PPCIC-Cefet/RJ), Pedro Henrique Gonzalez Silva (PPCIC-Cefet/RJ) and Claudio Miceli de Farias (COPPE/UFRJ)
Day/Hour: May 04, 2026 / 7 a.m.
Room: https://teams.microsoft.com/
Alternative link: https://meet.google.com/icf-
Abstract: This work investigates the relationship between the structure of passing networks in football and the competitive success of teams over a season. Starting from the hypothesis that structural properties of these networks are associated with competitive success, operationalized by final league standing, football is modeled as a complex system of collective interactions. Passing networks are represented as directed and weighted graphs, in which nodes correspond to players and edges represent passes exchanged between them. The IHG metric is proposed, grounded in the interquartile range of structural importance measures, designed to quantify the heterogeneity in players’ participation within the passing network. The empirical analysis considers five major European leagues — La Liga, Premier League, Ligue~1, Serie~A, and Bundesliga — in the 2015/16 season. For each team and match, passing networks are constructed in their baseline state, from which classical structural metrics are computed, followed by the application of progressive perturbations through node and edge removal until a minimum structural threshold is reached. The data suggest that IHG constitutes a stable indicator for associating network organization with competitive success. The results indicate that multiple topological properties are associated with teams’ final standings, although with different patterns across leagues. In particular, metrics related to global connectivity, structural cohesion, and reciprocity show stronger associations in leagues such as Serie~A and Bundesliga. In contrast, the Premier League exhibits lower sensitivity to traditional global metrics, with IHG emerging as the measure most consistently associated with performance, a result interpreted in light of the atypical nature of the 2015/16 season. The analysis under perturbation reveals that structural robustness is not uniformly distributed across metrics, as only a subset — particularly those associated with structural cohesion and, to a lesser extent, transport efficiency — preserves discriminative capacity after network degradation. The findings support the research hypothesis, indicating that competitive success does not depend on a single structural property, but rather on a set of topological characteristics whose relevance varies according to the competitive context. Finally, this work establishes an integrated framework for structural and robustness analysis in passing networks, enabling the evaluation not only of teams’ collective organization but also of their ability to preserve functional properties under perturbations.