Visual analysis of soccer players and a team Miohk Ryoo 1 & Namjung Kim 1 & Kyoungju Park 2 Received: 14 November 2016 /Revised: 4 August 2017 /Accepted: 21 August 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract Soccer is one of the most entertaining and popular sports around the world, and is also very interesting from a scientific point of view. Most of the scientific research on soccer is related to matches and game play analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel system for team performance analysis and visualization in terms of the structure of a team, and concentrate on cause-and-effect relationships between players and their teams based on player transfer data. Our system visualizes the individual player performance, team characteristics, comparisons between teams, and time varying changes of the team characteristics. The analyzed data are presented in two different ways (1) the system creates a pixel-grid visualization that presents the distinct characteristics of each player in a team. (2) A horizon graph is used to display the changes in team characteristics over time due to player transfers. This approach facilitates understanding the influence of player transfers on team characteristics in a very simple and straightforward manner. Keywords Soccer data . Visual analysis . Pixel grid visualization . Player visualization . Team visualization 1 Introduction Soccer is enjoyed by more than 4% of the global population. The audience for the final match of the European Champions League is estimated at more than two hundred million, and the Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-017-5137-4 * Miohk Ryoo vogue901@cau.ac.kr Namjung Kim sogalman@naver.com Kyoungju Park kjpark@cau.ac.kr 1 The Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia and Film, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea 2 School of Integrative Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea