Player detection is an important part in sports video analysis. Over the past few years, several learning based detection methods using various supervised two-class techniques have been presented. Although satisfactory results can be obtained, a lot of manual labor is needed to construct the training set. To overcome this drawback, this letter proposes a player detection method based on one-class SVM (OCSVM) using automatically generated training data. The proposed method is evaluated using several video clips captured from World Cup 2010, and experimental results show that our approach achieves a high detection rate while keeping the training set construction's cost low.