Using the PageRank Algorithm to Rank Football Players in a Game

There are many methods to rank football players based on their performance in a game or series of games. However, since most methods are subjective, this paper proposes the PageRank algorithm as an objective method to rank players in a football team, where players can be considered as the nodes, and the passes made between them as the edges of a graph. To achieve this, we consider weighting functions, which are based on parameters which consider the number and quality of passes as well as the actions of individual players in the game. The models generated by these weighting functions are compared with the official rankings of players using the Kendall's Tau Correlation Coefficient in order to find the distance between the two ranking vectors. This paper shows that the PageRank algorithm can be a promising and objective tool for ranking football players in a game.