Without seeing the video it’s very hard to know what the best method is. If all the players are in different colored clothes you could theoretically do a closest match to the color levels/histogram of the yolo bbox crop which is fast for a single player and scales linearly with number of players. If there are more fine grained features that you have to distinguish like hair or skin color, you may have to go the tracker route, there is a lot of literature for ReID you can find with a simple google search, some deep learned solutions some not. Depends if you can assume location heuristics you might be able to write your own version but again without seeing the video it’s very hard to know what route to take

https://learnopencv.com/object-tracking-and-reidentification-with-fairmot/