Found his phd thesis: Tracking and Modelling of Team Game Interactions. The author proposes a methodology to analyse the positional data in the context of football game. His motivation is due to:

1. With regard to computer vision, the tracking of sports players from video presents a challenging domain in which many people interact, occlude, make sudden body movements, and move in a non-linear fashion covering a large area of ground. 2. The analysis of positional data from such a system to identify team game interactions is a fascinating research area. Sports games that involve two teams of players provide a rich environment for modelling cooperative, collaborative and adversarial actions of individuals and for modelling the behaviour of the teams as a whole.

Graphic of Beckham's trajectory during a game.:

In addition, the author explains in a entire section what he can do with his methodology:

Capturing the behaviour of a set of sports players would allow many exciting activities to be performed; identifying tactics, predicting future movements, recognising set-plays, identifying teams, and evaluating teamwork.