Towards Understanding the Analysis, Models, and Future Directions of Sports Social Networks

With the rapid growth of information technology and sports, a large amount of sports social network data has emerged. Sports social network data contains rich entity information about athletes, coaches, sports teams, football, basketball, and other sports. Understanding the interaction among these entities is meaningful and challenging. To this end, we first introduce the background of sports social networks. Secondly, we review and categorize the recent research efforts in sports social networks and sports social network analysis based on passing networks, from the centrality and its variants to entropy, and several other metrics. Thirdly, we present and compare different sports social network models that have been used for sports social network analysis, modeling, and prediction. Finally, we present promising research directions in the rapidly growing field, including mining the genes of sports team success with multiview learning, evaluating the impact of sports team collaboration with motif-based graph networks, finding the best collaborative partners in a sports team with attention-aware graph networks, and finding the rising star for a sports team with attribute-based convolutional neural networks. This paper aims to provide the researchers with a broader understanding of the sports social networks, especially valuable as a concise introduction for budding researchers interested in this field.