luxury-lakehouse/football2vec-training-data

Football2Vec Training Data — SPADL Action Sequences

Tokenized SPADL action sequences for training the Football2Vec v2 transformer encoder. One row per player-match, covering ~87,000 sequences across ~3,000 professional soccer matches from StatsBomb Open Data and Wyscout.

Part of the (Right! Luxury!) Lakehouse soccer analytics platform.

Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("luxury-lakehouse/football2vec-training-data")
df = ds["train"].to_pandas()
print(f"{len(df)} player-match sequences")

# Inspect one sequence
row = df.iloc[0]
print(f"Player: {row['canonical_player_id']}, Match: {row['match_id']}")
print(f"Actions: {len(row['actions'])} events")
print(f"First action: {row['actions'][0]}")  # {'action_type': 0, 'x': 0.52, 'y': 0.34, 'result': 1}

Explore interactively: Soccer Analytics App

What Is This Dataset?

Each row represents one player's actions in one match, serialized as a struct array of SPADL-tokenized events. The 23-type SPADL vocabulary provides a unified action taxonomy across StatsBomb and Wyscout data sources. Continuous spatial coordinates (x, y) are normalized to [0, 1] on a 105×68m pitch.

This dataset is the training corpus for Football2Vec v2. It is exported from the platform's fct_action_values Delta table via the export_embeddings_training_data entry point and published here for reproducibility.

Data Fields

Column	Type	Description
canonical_player_id	string	Unified player identifier (from entity resolution across data sources)
match_id	string	Match identifier
competition_id	int	Competition identifier (used as adversarial target in Stage 2 training)
season_id	int	Season identifier
position_group	string (nullable)	Player position group: GK, Def, Mid, Fwd (from dim_players)
actions	array<struct>	Ordered sequence of tokenized SPADL actions

Action Struct Schema

Each element in the actions array:

Field	Type	Description
action_type	int	SPADL action type ID (0–22, 23 action types)
x	float	Normalized x coordinate [0, 1] on 105m pitch
y	float	Normalized y coordinate [0, 1] on 68m pitch
result	int	Binary outcome: 1 = success, 0 = failure

SPADL Action Vocabulary (23 types)

ID	Action	ID	Action	ID	Action
0	pass	8	foul	16	keeper_punch
1	cross	9	tackle	17	keeper_pick_up
2	throw_in	10	interception	18	clearance
3	freekick_crossed	11	shot	19	bad_touch
4	freekick_short	12	shot_penalty	20	non_action
5	corner_crossed	13	shot_freekick	21	dribble
6	corner_short	14	keeper_save	22	goalkick
7	take_on	15	keeper_claim

Schema Migration — Dual-Column Window (2026-04-25 → 2026-07-22)

PR 5b of the lakehouse Kimball migration (ADR-011) adds the BIGINT surrogate player_key to the upstream fct_player_embeddings* marts. The training-data export script (src/ingestion/export_embeddings_training_data.py) continues to read canonical_player_id only — this dataset's payload is unchanged in PR 5b. PR 8 (planned 2026-07-22) will add player_key to the payload in a backwards-compatible way and announce a sunset for canonical_player_id.

Recommended consumer behaviour during this window:

• No change required. Continue to read canonical_player_id from this dataset.
• If you maintain your own join to a dim_players clone, you may pre-compute player_key = xxhash64(provider || '|' || cast(player_id as string)) to align with the lakehouse Kimball convention ahead of the payload change.
• After 2026-07-22 the dataset will carry both columns for at least one HF dataset version, then canonical_player_id will be deprecated. Migrate at your convenience inside that window.

If you depend on this dataset and need extra notice before the column drop, open an issue on the lakehouse repo.

Data Sources

Source	Matches	License
StatsBomb Open Data	~3,000	CC-BY 4.0
Wyscout Public Dataset	~1,900	CC-BY-NC 4.0

Coverage includes the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Champions League, World Cup, and more.

Freshness

Metric	Value
Freshness SLA	168 hours (7 days)
Refresh trigger	Re-exported when upstream fct_action_values is updated with new match data
Publish script	src/ingestion/export_embeddings_training_data.py (entry point: export_embeddings_training_data)

Use Cases

• Transformer training: Primary training corpus for Football2Vec v2 (masked language modeling + adversarial debiasing)
• Custom embedding models: Train your own player embedding model on standardized SPADL sequences
• Sequence analysis: Study per-player action patterns, spatial tendencies, and decision sequences
• Vocabulary research: Compare action distributions across competitions, positions, or eras

Limitations

• Event-based only: Contains on-ball action sequences. Off-ball movement, pressing, and positioning are not represented.
• Open data only: Derived from publicly available StatsBomb and Wyscout data. Coverage is uneven across leagues and seasons.
• Coordinate normalization: All coordinates are normalized to [0, 1] on a 105×68m pitch (SPADL standard). Original provider-specific coordinate systems are not preserved.
• NULL position_group: Players not matched via entity resolution or lacking position metadata have position_group = NULL.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the SPADL framework and the Football2Vec v2 model:

@inproceedings{decroos2019actions,
  title={Actions Speak Louder than Goals: Valuing Player Actions in Soccer},
  author={Decroos, Tom and Bransen, Lotte and Van Haaren, Jan and Davis, Jesse},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
  pages={1851--1861},
  year={2019},
  publisher={ACM}
}

@software{nielsen2026football2vec_v2,
  title={Football2Vec v2: Transformer Player Embeddings with Adversarial Team Debiasing},
  author={Nielsen, Karsten Skyt},
  year={2026},
  url={https://github.com/karsten-s-nielsen/luxury-lakehouse}
}

Companion Resources

Resource	Description
Football2Vec v2 Model	192-dim transformer encoder trained on this data
Football2Vec v1 Model	32-dim Doc2Vec baseline
Player Embeddings	Pre-computed vectors (career/season/match)
SPADL/VAEP Action Values	Per-action offensive/defensive VAEP valuations

More Information

Explore interactively: Soccer Analytics App

• Model repo: luxury-lakehouse/football2vec-v2
• License: CC-BY-NC 4.0 (inherited from Wyscout data)

PR 7 changelog (2026-04-27)

PR 5b (2026-04-25) added player_key to the upstream training data lineage. The HF dataset payload republish was deferred at PR 5b and is absorbed into PR 7's scope. Payload now carries player_key (BIGINT) alongside the legacy player_id and canonical_player_id columns during the 2026-07-22 dual-column window. PR 8 will sunset the legacy ID columns post-2026-07-22.