Routines can boost performance – but they can also limit agility and innovation. This fundamental trade-off between consistency and flexibility shapes both our daily lives and strategic decision-making in business. Studying it directly in real-world organizations is difficult. Football, however, offers a unique opportunity: a highly competitive environment with standardized rules, repeated trials, and rich data.

In an interdisciplinary project between the TU Wien Master’s program in Data Science and the Sport & Management research initiative (RISM) at WU Vienna, we explored this trade-off using professional football as a testbed. Leveraging detailed event-level data from StatsBomb, we developed an algorithm to measure how consistent – or agile – a team’s passing style is across matches.

The model detects shifts in passing patterns by analyzing pass characteristics (e.g., angle, speed, player positioning) and clustering them into recurring sequences. A similarity score between games quantifies how much a team’s play style changes over time.

Results show that accounting for opponent influence improves our ability to identify a team’s tactical identity. This enables new insights into when consistency drives performance – and when agility makes the difference.

Learn more about the results of this project and its insights in the article published by our media partner sportsbusiness.at.