Visualization and team sports have an important and established relationship that is seldom understood. Team sports can be considered as complex activities containing a considerable number of abstract datasets and participant categories, such as athletes, coaches, referees and spectators. This paper proposes that the field of visualization has been applied within team sports in various ways to provide these participants with representations of these datasets. This has resulted in data-augmented games which are easier to play, judge and watch respectively.

This paper provides a review of past and current applications of visualization within team sports. A model is presented to classify sports visualizations along conceptual axes. This model will allow future or potentially untapped applications of team sports visualization to be identified and classified.