# ELASTIC: Event-Tracking Data Synchronization in Soccer Without Annotated Event Locations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09238 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09238/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [JointDiff: Bridging Continuous and Discrete in Multi-Agent Trajectory Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22522/) (2025)
- [Better Prevent than Tackle: Valuing Defense in Soccer Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10355/) (2025)
- [VERSA: Verified Event Data Format for Reliable Soccer Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21981/) (2026)
- [PathCRF: Ball-Free Soccer Event Detection via Possession Path Inference from Player Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12080/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of event and tracking data has become essential for advanced analysis in soccer. However, synchronizing these two modalities remains a significant challenge due to temporal and spatial inaccuracies in manually recorded event timestamps. Existing synchronizers typically rely on annotated event locations, which themselves are prone to spatial errors and thus can distort synchronization results. To address this issue, we propose ELASTIC (Event-Location-AgnoSTIC synchronizer), a synchronization framework that only uses features derived from tracking data. ELASTIC also explicitly detects the end times of pass-like events and separates the detection of major and minor events, which improves the completeness of the synchronized output and reduces error cascade across events. We annotated the ground truth timestamps of 2,134 events from three Eredivisie matches to measure the synchronization accuracy, and the experimental results demonstrate that ELASTIC outperforms existing synchronizers by a large margin.