For the research project ‘Brazil versus the Netherlands: the Secrets of Playing Football’, Dutch and Brazilian researchers are developing an analysis of tactics in football to objectively quantify (and compare) tactics of different countries, competition levels, and age-groups. Additionally, the developed tactical analyses should help a coach gain insight into the tactical performance of their team to evaluate previous – and prepare for upcoming – matches. We developed a user interface, the ‘Coach Cockpit’, on top of this analysis. The Coach Cockpit can be used by coaches and scientist to gain insights into the analysis in a user-friendly, recognizable and visual way.
Our client was Rens Meerhoff, he is a staff member at LIACS. Our client being a staff member of LIACS was a great advantage since this lowered the threshold for us to plan meetings and jump into his office for questions. During the project we built a good relationship with the client, causing us to feel at ease and increase the understanding of the client’s needs. This resulted in very efficient and clear communication.
The team consisted of seven students in total, four students from the Computer Science bachelor and three students from the Computer Science and Economics bachelor. The diverse nature of our team resulted in a clear and balanced skill set distributed over the members of the team. This also made the division of roles during the project easy and efficient.
The whole project was written in Java with Netbeans as IDE. We used the JFrame framework for construction different the user interface elements and normal Java code for the backend. Some low-level knowledge of Python was also required, because we had to alter some Python code to ensure a good connection between the different elements within this project.