In the world of football, performance analytics about a player’s skill level and the overall tactics of a match are supportive for the success of a team. These analytics are based on positional data on the one hand and events about the game on the other hand. The positional data of the ball and players is tracked automatically by cameras or via sensors. However, the events are still captured manually by human, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, this paper introduces an approach to detect events based on the positional data of football matches. We trained and aggregated the machine learning algorithms Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbours and Random Forest, based on features, which were calculated on base of the positional data. We evaluated the quality of our approach by comparing the recall and precision of the results. This allows an assessment of how event detection in football matches can be improved by automating this process based on spatio-temporal data. We discovered, that it is possible to detect football events from positional data. Nevertheless, the choice of a specific algorithm has a strong influence on the quality of the predicted results.