← Prashanth Shankar

Pitch Space Finder

A full-size 11-a-side pitch with two numbered teams. Drag any player and everything recomputes live: each team's largest internal gap (the biggest hole between its own players), a red→green congestion heatmap, and a panel of spatial-control metrics. Useful for asking concrete questions — is there a hole between our lines, should the 9 drop into it, are we too compact?

Per-team space Space as region Heatmap Team shape Player territories

Spatial metrics

Metric	Blue	Red

—pitch control—

crowdedopen

What the metrics mean

Largest space: Radius of the biggest circle that fits inside a team's own shape without touching one of that team's players — the largest hole in their structure.
Pitch control: Share of the pitch whose nearest player is on that team (a discrete Voronoi / nearest-neighbour dominance map).
Surface area: Area of the team's convex hull — how much of the pitch the outfield shape physically spans.
Stretch index: Mean distance of players from their team centroid — overall dispersion. Low = compact block, high = spread out.
Compactness: Average distance from each player to their nearest team-mate — local tightness of the unit.
Length × Width: Bounding-box depth (goal-to-goal axis) × breadth (touchline axis) the team occupies.
Centroid gap: Distance between the two team centroids — how far the lines of engagement are pushed apart.
Avg spacing: Mean distance over all 231 player pairs — the global density of the 22 outfielders.

The maths. Each team's space is the largest empty circle that fits between its own players: candidate centres are that team's Voronoi vertices (points equidistant from three team-mates), kept inside the team's convex hull and hill-climbed to maximise the distance to the nearest team-mate — so the circle fills the biggest hole in the team's shape without crossing one of its own players. (The combined-space toggle instead finds the biggest circle clear of all 22.) Space as region swaps that single circle for the true shape of the open space: it contours the clearance field at an adaptive threshold, masked to a band around the team's convex hull, so an irregular pocket — say the wedge between two players and the touchline — is highlighted as a multi-sided polygon (with holes where players sit) rather than forced into a circle. Pitch control integrates the nearest-player Voronoi partition over a 1 m grid; surface area uses the Andrew monotone-chain convex hull and the shoelace formula; stretch index and compactness are first- and nearest-neighbour moments of the team's point cloud. It's a single static frame — v1 of a tool meant to grow into time-averaged "persistently open zones" later.