I remember when this article was knocking around during last Summer, and came away thinking "nope, that's not how to analy[s|z]e a [football|soccer] game".

I have people inside a Premier League club just waiting for me to be able to throw OpenCV at an archive of video and turn it into something useful they can do something with, and have had for a couple of years now. I think in 2019 we might get there, but it isn't quite this.

Object detection isn't enough, and drawing paths isn't enough. You need to know which player is which, where on the pitch they are, the phase of the game (knowing who has possession is enough, but knowing current score and minutes of play elapsed is also helpful), how long the player has been on the pitch, etc., etc.

At that point you can then start to do some real analysis. It's doable, but not trivial, and this is only the start.

Good work on the object detection though.

If anybody reading this thinks they know how to do the above and is interested in having an interesting conversation about it, feel free to ping me...