SciSports validated the assignment of Player Roles to players in consultation with a panel of football practitioners. SciSports requested the panel to manually label a set of over 1,000 football players with their primary Player Role based on their expertise and observations. Using these labels, SciSports optimized the underlying algorithm such that the players are assigned the correct Player Roles based on the data that are available about the players. Furthermore, where relevant, SciSports compared the data-driven Player Role assignments with the Player Role assignments in the Football Manager video game.

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