  Over the last few decades, the player recruitment process in professional
football has evolved into a multi-billion industry and has thus become of vital
importance. To gain insights into the general level of their candidate
reinforcements, many professional football clubs have access to extensive video
footage and advanced statistics. However, the question whether a given player
would fit the team's playing style often still remains unanswered. In this
paper, we aim to bridge that gap by proposing a set of 21 player roles and
introducing a method for automatically identifying the most applicable roles
for each player from play-by-play event data collected during matches.
