This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness and influencing factors of different machine learning algorithms on soccer footwork recognition. In this paper, we use inertial sensors to obtain the basic data of soccer players’ movements, then convert them into initial data of footwork using pose representation and pose-solving filtering. The value of K mainly influences the classification accuracy of KNN, and the highest accuracy of 67.23% is achieved when K is 5. The classification accuracy of SVM is related to the choice of the distance function. The accuracy of CNN is mainly affected by the size of the convolutional kernel and the convolutional step size, and the highest accuracy is 73.82%. The machine learning-based soccer step recognition can improve the recognition accuracy of traditional physical methods and provide scientific sports guidance for soccer players’ training.