# Training-Free Off-Screen Player Imputation for Broadcast-Based Spatial Football Analytics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11548/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11335/) (2024)
- [PnLCalib: Sports Field Registration via Points and Lines Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08401/) (2024)
- [TranSPORTmer: A Holistic Approach to Trajectory Understanding in Multi-Agent Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17785/) (2024)
- [Inferring Player Location in Sports Matches: Multi-Agent Spatial Imputation from Limited Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06569/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Soccer Camera Calibration Through Keypoint Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07401/) (2024)
- [FOOTPASS: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Tactical Context Dataset for Play-by-Play Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcast Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16183/) (2025)
- [Trajectory Imputation in Multi-Agent Sports with Derivative-Accumulating Self-Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10878/) (2024)
- [Continuous football player tracking from discrete broadcast data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14642/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How Much Velocity Does Off-Ball Space Value Need? A Broadcast-Viewport Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10801/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial football metrics such as pitch control assume access to the positions of all 22 players, yet the most widely available source of positional data -- the broadcast main camera -- shows only 10-16 of them at any moment. We quantify the resulting distortion with an open, reproducible benchmark: a simulated broadcast viewport applied to open full-pitch tracking data (Metrica Sports; three matches, one held out from method development). Ignoring off-screen players -- the visible-only baseline implied whenever a video-based game-state-reconstruction (GSR) pipeline adds no imputation layer -- inflates hidden-zone pitch-control error to 25.1-26.9 percentage points and a mean absolute control-share error of 11.1-13.4 points across the three matches. We then evaluate a ladder of training-free, online imputation baselines that use only observations from the match being analysed. The best overall on these decision-relevant metrics, role-anchored centroid voting (each visible player votes for the full-team centroid by subtracting its running role offset, attenuating the viewport-induced subset bias), roughly halves hidden-zone error (to 12.2-13.8 points) and cuts control-share error to 28-48% of the ignore policy at every viewport width from 36 m to 60 m in all three matches. For occlusions <=9.6 s -- the regime of the closest learned prior work -- it reaches binwise median position errors of 3.3-8.9 m; but 50-57% of hidden-player observations lie beyond that regime. Integrated end-to-end into a broadcast-video GSR pipeline, imputation moves a downstream possession-quality score (Space-Creation Index) by 15.6 and 17.2 points on two real World Cup broadcast windows, flipping the verdict class in one.