What network science can tell us about the 2026 World Cup
Northeastern Global News will provide a front-row seat to the World Cup with insights from Northeastern’s Network Science Institute.
Team Australia kicked it long from the goalkeeper. Switzerland took a slower approach and preferred short passes over long drives. Spain, on the other hand, tended to string the ball with sharp, sideways passes across the field.
Those are a few of the takeaways from passing-style graphics that the Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute developed of the top soccer teams at the FIFA World Cup 2022 that showcased their most distinctive passing clusters.
Northeastern’s Network Science Institute’s NetSI Sport research group, which studies sports by analyzing comprehensive datasets and determining emergent patterns, plans to deliver more information and insights on players and teams competing in the FIFA World Cup 2026, which takes place June 11 to July 19.
Forty-eight teams across 16 host cities in the U.S., Mexico and Canada will participate in this year’s World Cup — the largest on record.
“There’s more teams, and what that does is it injects potentially new room for innovation,” said Brennan Klein, a Northeastern University physics professor and director of the NetSI Sport research group. “Tactically, it might mean there’s more room for potential upsets.”
As a network scientist, Klein sees soccer a little differently than most.
The average fan might think of a game as just a series of plays and goals, but Klein views it as an integrated network of systems that can be used to produce interesting visuals and highlight trends.
These graphics show the top five most distinctive passing clusters for Spain, Switzerland and Australia during the World Cup 2022 above and beyond typical passing patterns. Courtesy of NetSI Sport
In fact, recent research from the group analyzed more than 13,000 matches from some of the top leagues in the world from 2020 to 2025, and drew some notable conclusions, namely that over the past five years, average passing volumes and pass accuracy have increased.
At Northeastern’s Network Science Institute, Maddalena Torricelli, a postdoctoral researcher studying sports analytics, and others in NetSI Sport research group analyze data from thousands of games to create charts, graphics, and maps to help provide new insights into the sport.
Data can tell you nearly anything about the game if you know how to read and synthesize what you are looking at, she said.
“It can tell you about a single player’s performance to team performances in general,” she said. “In a sense, you can help you understand how the teams have evolved across time and World Cups.”
Similar to how network science is used to predict when seizures might occur in the brain, Klein said his group is hoping to show that similar predictive phenomena can be observed by analyzing soccer data using a similar approach.
Which players should coaches scout to match certain play styles? What players tend to hold onto the ball over others?
Those are the questions network science researchers at the NetSI Sports research group are beginning to explore.
“The benefit you get is that you start to move beyond averages and you start to see these sequences or motifs that recur throughout matches, that recur throughout time or across leagues,” he said.
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The evolution of soccer analytics
The institute’s research focus has only become more relevant in the past decade as soccer analysts have gone from just analyzing box scores to focusing on “events-driven” data, Klein said.
It’s a trend that Ashley Phillips, head coach for Northeastern University’s women’s soccer team, has also observed. Phillips said that the sport has evolved greatly even within the past five years. From more public access to granular-level game statistics to video editing software that uses artificial intelligence to pull certain plays.
“It’s not just my opinion anymore,” she said. “I can concretely show our players’ data. I have more to show them than what just came from my eyes. I can say, ‘You created this many scoring opportunities, and this person had this many turnovers.’ … It’s probably overwhelming for some people.”
Klein likens the “events-driven” data to narrative play-by-plays, and an average game has around 3,000 to 4,000 such events, he said.
“It’s [the U.K.-based Arsenal Football Club’s] Ben White passing to [teammate] William Saliba who passes to [midfielder] Martin Ødegaard, who dribbles it at this position on the pitch and takes a shot,” he said.
The research uses this level of data, which provides insights into teams’ completed passes, carries, pressures, expected goals, and other insights to create their visuals, Klein explained.
“What that gives us is a completely different starting point for how to think about the flow of the game, and the evolution of sports as a whole, and as we are approaching something like the World Cup it just gives us a whole new lens of ways of describing this massive global event,” he added.
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Covering the World Cup
Northeastern Global News will provide a front-row seat to the World Cup research by the Network Science Institute over the next few weeks, which will take advantage of real-time game data from the sports analytics company Hudle StatsBomb for its analysis.
The network science research will provide a deeper systems-level perspective on the World Cup, Klein said.
“Fans get a lot out of reporting that treats them like an adult,” Klein said. “Fans of soccer who have their own deep intuitions and understanding about this sport can get more out of it by understanding the rich data structures and representations that the teams themselves are using.”
But it will also be exciting for those tuning into soccer for the first time, he said.
“It brings them into the game in a completely new way that’s different than just seeing in the newspaper that Spain beat England 1-0,” Klein added. “You actually start to see that this sport is patterned, complex and interesting in ways that I think these types of data and visualizations and reporting projects can really expose.”
