Emergence of self-similarity in football dynamics

The multiplayer dynamics of a football game is analyzed to unveil self-similarities in the time evolution of player and ball positioning. Temporal fluctuations in both the team-turf boundary and the ball location are uncovered to follow the rules of fractional Brownian motion with a Hurst exponent of H ~ 0.7. The persistence time below which self-similarity holds is found to be several tens of seconds, implying a characteristic time scale that governs far-from-equilibrium motion on a playing field. Copyright The Author(s) 2014