Month: October 2018

In something a little different today, I'm going to discuss five simple ways data can help football teams gain an advantage. There's this idea among football's old guard that data is complicated and difficult, but the reality is, we try and provide useful insight that is easy to understand and interpret.

1) Corner Touch Maps

This is what we call a corner touch map. Marek and I designed it back in 2014 to help out with the set piece program, and it's probably the dumbest, simplest vis we'll ever build.

 

 

What it shows is the first touch by either team after a corner is taken.

Why?

Because I can show you a shot map of where teams have had shots off corners, but that only tells you about when they have been successful. These maps more clearly show their plan and - generally - their intended delivery zones.

Check out the map from right-sided corners from Manchester City last season.

 

 

This immediately tells you two things. First, they take a lot of short corners, and you need to be ready for those. Second...

 

 

City apparently only took outswingers from that side last season, and as a result, neither team had a touch in the box on the left HALF of the six yard box.

And honestly, if I am an opposing coach facing City, my life is nearly impossible as it is, so I am thanking little baby jesus for making my life much easier by allowing me to generally ignore marking that zone (unless there are runners) and overload the zones along the curve. This is just a tiny glimpse of how we use data to help execute set pieces at both ends of the pitch.

2) Arsenal's Left Lane

 

 

This is what we call a Defensive Activity Map. Teams are attacking from left to right. The vis attempts to profile where teams are making defensive actions (including pressures), and then compares their defensive activity in each area to the rest of the teams in the league. Zones where they make more actions than average are hotter, and zones where they have fewer actions are greyer or blue.

Arsenal this season are slanted right, possibly because of personnel issues (left back injuries), but maybe as part of a plan? This type of vis doesn't deliver a magical recipe for how to solve/attack tactical issues, but it does help coaches and analysts ask interesting questions. As a coach, I go to the video and try to figure out what is weird. If I am an analyst, maybe I compare the success of attacks down Arsenal's left compared to the right/center and see if there is a vulnerability that way.

3) Similarity Scores

We use these a lot in recruitment, largely because it's easy to talk to coaches about who their ideal player for a position is as opposed to all of the precise things they need that player to do on the pitch.

Once you know which players fill their ideal archetypes, you can then dig into the data for what those players do on metrics you care about, and then plonk down a list of players to scout in the leagues you can afford.

Coach, who is your ideal wide forward?

"I want Lionel Messi."

(Seriously - this always happens. Every coach says this exact same joke.)

And because we are indulgent number wonks who have this already set up in StatsBomb IQ, we can answer the question honestly.

The most similar players to Messi 17-18 in our current data set are:

Neymar Messi (18-19 edition)

Eden Hazard

Raheem Sterling

and Nicolas Pepe, who has been on fire so far this year.

But the fun part of this is that you can actually narrow down the data to the leagues you can afford to buy players in and still have the exact same conversation.

Who is the Lionel Messi of League One? 2017-18 Bradley Dack, maybe? Or Conor Chaplin?

How about in Austria Bundesliga? Uh... Andrei Ivan?

Look, I'm not saying the data is always right in these situations, but shopping for the poor man's Messi apparently comes with serious limitations.

4) Evaluating Goalkeepers

On Monday, we released phase 1 of the Goalkeeper Module into StatsBomb IQ. It allows teams to profile goalkeepers statistically across a broad range of metrics that haven't really been available before because in other data sets, we never knew where the keeper was when a shot took place.

We were messing around with some of the visualisations in testing and came across this fun one for last year. David De Gea and Joe Hart faced almost exactly the same amount of xG in shots on target last season, but how that xG came about and what happened after that was dramatically different.

 

 

The vis above is broken into xG buckets, and you'll notice that the shots Hart had to content with were generally much higher quality than those De Gea dealt with. Sadly, nearly every high xG shot Hart faced also made it into the back of the goal.

When it comes to analysing and evaluating GKs with stats, we're just getting started. Expect to see a lot more from us on this topic in the coming weeks.

5) Passing Tendencies at the Team and Player Level

 

 

TL;DR

Stats don't have to be complicated to deliver powerful, useful insight. And often the simple stuff is the most effective IF you know where to find it.

Ted Knutson ted@statsbomb.com @mixedknuts

Despite a knockout performance against Real Madrid this weekend, across this season there seems to have been a notable dip in Barcelona’s performance levels. We take a look at what’s happening. After ten games, Barcelona are top of the La Liga table. Alternatively, after ten games, Barcelona are seven points worse off than at this stage last season. Two things can be true at once. It’s worth mentioning that the Camp Nou faithful are famously quick to describe anything below perfection as a crisis, and last year’s almost unbeaten season was a feat unlikely to be repeated. Still, there are legitimate questions about their performance level so far this season.. A look at their expected goal trendline shows that the issues didn’t arrive from nowhere this season: (all data current as of 21st October) That’s a fairly alarming rise in xG conceded over the second half of last season. The crucial context is that Barcelona were so far ahead in the league at this point that these fixtures were not usually “must win” games, but you still don’t want to see your defence suddenly deteriorate at this rate. Manager Ernesto Valverde seems to have found a way to restore a level of solidity on the defensive side of the ball this year, but it has come at an attacking cost. The 1.87 expected goals per game that the team is currently creating remains the best in the league, but it is a significant step down from last year’s stratospheric figure of 2.14. When averaging out for the whole season, the expected goals conceded don’t look as different (1.18 per game this year vs 1.06 last season), but it still puts their defence as merely the ninth best in the league. So we have an attack that is down significantly but still the best in Spain, and a defence that has come close to maintaining last year’s level, yet is barely better than league average. Clearly, Barcelona’s issues need to be examined on both sides of the ball.  

Defence

The aforementioned uptick in expected goals conceded towards the end of last season seemingly did not go unnoticed by Valverde, who has made some very noticeable tactical tweaks without the ball. In terms of raw shot numbers, this has been a big success, with the Catalan side now conceding just 8.67 shots per 90 minutes compared to last year’s figure of 11.71. Suppressing the volume of shots conceded is a telltale sign of a high pressing system, and Barcelona have indeed seen an uptick on StatsBomb’s high press metric, up to 48.76 from last year’s 47.50 (a more significant increase than it sounds). This pressing increase has also been noted by friend of the site Michael Caley, with his data showing that Barcelona are now quicker to break up opposition possessions. Looking at their defensive activity map, Barcelona are now very clearly much more aggressive in the opposition half than their own. But while Barcelona are defending differently, it is not particularly clear that they are defending better. The xG per shot conceded has risen from 0.08 to a fairly horrific 0.14. No other side in La Liga has a figure this high. It’s worth saying that while Barcelona were still conceding chances last season, they were able to rely on the excellent form of Marc-Andre ter Stegen, rated the best shot stopper in La Liga last year by StatsBomb’s data. While last year’s significant defensive overperformance was unlikely to be repeated, even with such a high quality goalkeeper, it’s possible that the shift in style has not helped ter Stegen. He is now facing different types of shots from last season, fewer in frequency but harder to save. With Barca merely conceding as expected this year, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if ter Stegen might be less suited to making excellent saves in this kind of system, though it will take more games to be confident of this. The high pressing style is of course not unfamiliar to the Camp Nou faithful. The famous Barcelona team at the start of this decade managed by Pep Guardiola built there approach without the ball around a proactive attempt to win it back quickly, starting with Lionel Messi and the other forwards. Any team looking to instigate a high pressing approach would need to rely on a front line consistently harrying the opponent. But when looking at the players making the pressures for Barcelona, it is not the attackers doing the most work: Holding midfielder Sergio Busquets is the only player making more than 20 pressures per 90. Of players that could very loosely be defined as attackers, it is only Ousmane Dembele appearing as a high volume presser. Luis Suarez, lauded in his Liverpool days for never stopping without the ball, is making just 12.45 pressures per 90, below average for a striker (albeit in a team with the majority of possession). Messi, truly the first line of defence in Guardiola’s side, is down among the least active players at 9.59. That both Suarez and Messi are now 31 years old may not be a coincidence here, and if the two of them cannot get through the pressing work that they once could, this could be a serious problem if Barcelona stick with the high press. When looking at the players pressing for Guardiola’s current club Manchester City, it is a different story. Bernardo Silva (who plays as both a more advanced central midfielder and in the front three) leads the way, followed by attackers Riyad Mahrez, Sergio Aguero and Gabriel Jesus. While his equivalent at Barcelona led the way, City’s holding midfielder Fernandinho is having to pressure the ball infrequently. The pressing in front of him is so good that he is rarely called upon. Busquets cannot say the same for the players in front of him at the Camp Nou.  

Attack

Let’s start by emphasizing, again, that expected goals still rates Barcelona’s attack as the best in La Liga, so any issues are by their standards and theirs alone. But still, there are issues. The attacking situation mirrors the defensive one in that everything looks great if you just look at raw shots. They’re taking a very healthy 17.89 of them per 90, a nice chunk more than last year’s 15.47. But, just as with the defence, the issue is not of quantity but quality. The xG per shot of 0.10 is middling for any side, but for Barcelona, it is downright uncharacteristic. As our fearless leader here at StatsBomb once said, “they just don’t take long range shots”. Or at least, they didn’t. Last year, 57% of the shots Barcelona took had an xG value of less than 0.10. This season, that figure is 64%. The shots they have added are mostly speculative efforts. It’s an effect that has happened across the team. When looking at their radars, it’s obvious that the side’s two primary shot generators, Messi and Suarez, just aren’t getting the same quality of chance as before: Looking at personnel changes, of course Andres Iniesta has been sold, but his skillset has been replaced fairly naturally by Philippe Coutinho. The one player who featured regularly last season and hasn’t seen a like for like replacement is Paulinho. No, seriously. Paulinho, though lacking in some other areas of the game, has shown in his career a great ability to get chances from excellent positions, with his xG per shot of 0.206 the highest of any Barcelona player last year. It is not just the goals Paulinho scored for himself, though. As Mike Goodman (who is editing this article, so any further compliments have been put in by himself) (ed. note--I would never!!) noted last season, “Paulinho’s primary job at Barça has been to charge forward from midfield into space and make runs that have the same kind of effect on a defense that a winger’s might. Time it right and get free for a pass, or suck the defense in and open up secondary options”. Barcelona do now have a genuine winger to make those kinds of runs in Dembele, fully integrated into the side after last year’s disrupted campaign. The Frenchman, though, has struggled to make the off the ball runs that the side requires, mostly functioning as more of a ball carrier with his dribbling threat. This is surely the most obvious solution to the team’s attacking issues. Dembele needs to look at the way Pedro used to play with Messi at the Camp Nou: doing most of his attacking work without the ball. Many others have had to curb their instincts to play with Messi, and Dembele needs to do the same in order to make this team tick.  

Conclusion

On both sides of the ball, it’s the same story: Barcelona have become all about dominating in terms of shot volume, and are paying the price in shot quality. Defensively, this seems to be due to a switch to a higher pressing system of which the suitability of the current personnel is debatable. In terms of the attack, the issue seems to be more about players’ specific roles, with no one quite filling the job Paulinho did last season as an additional runner into the box. In both cases, there are tactical tweaks that could help smooth things over, perhaps by turning the high press down a bit and adding an extra central midfielder for solidity, and by coaching Dembele into someone who can make more off the ball runs into the box (or trying Malcom if he can’t). These are, though, merely short term tweaks around the edges. There remains the elephant in the room of a squad getting worryingly old. Sir Alex Ferguson said that a football team should never be allowed to grow old together. Barcelona have found themselves in a position where the core of the side is built around Messi, Suarez, Ivan Rakitic, Busquets and Gerard Pique, all of whom are over the age of 30. Attempting to return to something closer to the old style of Guardiola isn’t paying dividends because the players can’t exert the same energy they once did for a high pressing system. While Valverde may find a way to patch things up for this season, the long term prospects for Barcelona do not look as strong as they have been for the past decade.   Header image courtesy of the Press Association

It wasn’t enough for Fulham to simply  return to the Premier League. The club wanted to stay up with style. Owner Shahid Khan did not approach this pursuit half-heartedly. He locked down Tom Cairney and 18-year-old Championship Player of the Season Ryan Sessegnon, and then backed manager Slavisa Jokanovic in the transfer market to the tune of £100 million. This expenditure has not just been plentiful but largely seen as well-scouted and soundly considered.. The most eye-catching signing of the bunch was central midfielder Jean-Michael Seri, a player linked  with a strong share of the world’s elite clubs. While the eye-popping sums of money Fulham threw about surely turned turned off some, Fulham’s sexy style of play and intelligent expenditure had most neutrals intrigued. Their return to England’s top division had the potential to be a celebration of football, but, nine games in, Fulham have dropped into the relegation zone, a fact which should come as no surprise considering their expected goal difference of negative 0.97, the second worst in the Premier League A team averaging 530 passes per game, the seventh most in the league, while losing games is certain to bring the familiar faces of punditocracy’s old guard out of the woodwork. They bring with them questions over whether newly promoted teams can succeed while playing a possession based brand of football. There are some issues within Fulham’s play on the ball. There’s a general lack of organisation, that is to say, it doesn’t appear as if Jokanovic is utilising a positional play system that is the supporting structure of all of the world’s best possession coaches, with perhaps the exception of Maurizio Sarri. Further, Jokanovic’s temptation to start games with both Sessegnon and Schurrle, two players whose major contribution to attacking play is to arrive in the box at the right moment to make their first touch a shot, is going to have an inevitable effect on final third play which may be connected to Fulham’s tendency to shoot from distance. Schurrle is a particularly egregious culprit. These quibbles in mind, Fulham’s  attacking xG of 1.12 is still better than seven other sides, despite having already played Spurs, Man City and Arsenal. They can aspire to improve in this department but so far it seems their attacking efforts can largely be interpreted as functional is not outstanding. It is the other end of the pitch which is the issue, with The Cottagers having conceded the highest number of both expected (2.10 per match) and actual (25) goals. Fulham’s dedication to passing sees the ball somewhat regularly stolen from a defender or deep midfielder before a dangerous attack immediately ensuing for the opposition. These turnovers are always the most visceral argument against a short passing game but, to an extent, they might just be an acceptable systemic tradeoff, just as any tactical method has its own strengths and vulnerabilities. Fulham’s success or failure either way will in no way provide a definitive answer to the question of promotion sides and possession football. The mould has already been broken by Swansea under Brendan Rodgers and Michael Laudrup, Southampton under Mauricio Pochettino and to a lesser extent Bournemouth under Eddie Howe. However, just as all three of these teams have shared similarities on the ball they also have a familiar method off of it, namely, counter-pressing. Conventional coaching knowledge tells us that if you want to push your entire team forward and play the game in the opposition’s half of the pitch then you need to be defending in those areas too. Via the defensive activity map we can see this is going catastrophically badly. Exactly where Fulham need to be exceeding average activity they are instead almost entirely absent. The map also highlights a horizontal imbalance in their own defensive third. Whether that’s a reaction to being repeatedly targeted on one side or an inability to perform defensive actions on the opposite is a big issue either way.   The term counter-pressing means exactly that - apply pressure to the counter-attack. Fulham’s failure to do that leaves them vulnerable. Failing to stop counter-attacks far from goal is how a team that has so much of the ball also ends up leading the league in passes allowed in their own penalty area. But this style of play is not new to Fulham this season and neither is the manager. Jokanovic is fully aware of these issues and has demonstrated his ability to coach an efficient counter-pressing system as he achieved promotion with the club. Fulham finished in third place before winning the playoffs. They had the highest average share of possession throughout the season and conceded a, for the Championship, respectable single goal per game, showcasing their ability to control the opposition. https://giphy.com/gifs/fulham-pressing-derby-ljzyPiVfRWutEI3OJz The reality is developing a counter-pressing system takes time. Just look at the difference between first and second year Guardiola’s Man City, or Sarri and Emery’s current shaky starts - at least in the underlying numbers - this season. Reading and reacting to an opposition misplaced pass. Chasing forward without hesitating to check behind for your teammate picking up the player you’re leaving behind. Stepping up from the defensive line when instinct tells you to retreat. All these things require a level of group cohesion that can not be found over the course of a single pre-season, heavily interrupted by glamour friendlies. These challenges can be seen in specific relation to Jokanovic’s style of play as he arrived at a Fulham side in the Championship, gradually taking them from relegation threat to 3rd place over the course of two and a half seasons. The large investment into the squad, while likely needed to adapt to a considerably higher level of competition, can also act as something of a reset for the manager’s coaching process. Given all this, patience carries a considerable value but with every dropped point the pressure mounts. If there is one team Fulham should be beating it’s Cardiff with their very Championship squad and style of play. Instead, they conceded four goals, a result which was a fair, if slightly exaggerated, representation of their performance on the day If the board are considering reaction to the results thus far then they should likely consider Jokanovic and possession football as one and the same. His ability to coach it appears high level, and Fulham will have a hard time finding someone who can enact a pressing method quicker than he can. A panic move away from Jokanovic, therefore should also be a move away from the possession approach. Given the squad the club have put together and the money spent in doing so this may well be considered a risky approach in of itself. Just as Swansea and Southampton have demonstrated the viability of possession football for bottom 14 sides they also highlight the dangers in moving away from it with the former relegated and the latter under threat having moved to a more direct approach. The real question for Khan then, is not the suitability of the play-style to the league, or the manager to the challenge, but the new players to the pressing system - and the difficulty of applying it in such a high quality league. It’s probably safe to be optimistic over interception monster Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa and ex-Dortmund player Andre Schurrle. If we consider Seri, though excellent on the ball, the most ‘leightweight’ of the new players and also operating in a crucial midfield role then we may have concern over his output of more traditional defensive metrics. However, nearly three pressure regains per90 for Nice last seasons suggests he should at least have a means of contributing defensively. Jokanovic has yet to start a game with the midfield trio that would be considered their first choice - Anguissa, Cairney and Seri - perhaps this could be considered reason not to judge them on this short sample. Further, he has trialled a two man midfield, a three man defence and in the process put no less than seventeen players on more than 250 league minutes. These changes, likely attempting to find a balance between the systemically established players of old and the higher talent ceiling of new, all while managing early season fitness, hits the catch 22 of stalling the growth of cohesion while attempting to find the formula in which to grow it - and win games in the process. As the aforementioned Rodgers once said, managing a football club is like building a plane while it’s in the air. While Fulham may be struggling to take flight right now, changing the architect mid season will only make an ultimate crash more likely.   Header Image courtesy of the Press Association

For almost a decade the top of the soccer pyramid was clear. The world order was Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and then everybody else. Those three teams combined have won the last six Champions Leagues (though to be fair, Madrid won four of the last five on their own) and seven of the last eight. But, the times they are a changing.

The big three are, for various reasons, all struggling this year. At Real Madrid the drop off is easy to understand. After years of doubling down on featuring Cristiano Ronaldo’s talents at the expense of everybody else, Ronaldo left last summer. The man who got the most out of latter day Ronaldo, manager Zinedine Zidane also left. It was the end of an era. They didn’t prepare for a new era. You can never replace a player like Ronaldo, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Madrid didn’t bother to try, and it has resulted in a predictable struggle to score goals.

At Barcelona and Bayern the causes are more difficult to tease out. But, to some degree there are explanations to be found in the fact that both teams rely on players that are the wrong side of 30. At Bayern it’s Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery who are not only in their mid-30s but are also, still, the creative engine that Bayern rely on to make their entire side tick. In Barcelona the list of aging players is even long. The (now injured) GOAT Lionel Messi might show no signs of slowing down but the same isn’t true for Sergio Busquets, Luis Suarez, Ivan Rakitic, and Gerard Pique. There are a lot of miles in those legs.

The reasons might be complex, but the result is simple, the big three is no more. A new group of teams are storming the top of Europe’s elite. Two teams from outside the big three have clearly distinguished themselves as the best in Europe this season, another three or four might consider themselves, at least on par with the big three. The question is no longer will the big three maintain their dominance, but rather will another, different group of teams form a similar elite club in the wake of the big three era.

Right now, the two best teams in the world are Manchester City and Juventus, and it’s not particularly close. Both have statistical profiles that absolutely blow away their domestic league. City have an expected goal difference of just under 2.5 expected goals per match. Nobody else in the Premier League has an expected goal difference over 1.00. They allow 6.44 shots per match, two fewer than any other Premier League team. They take 22.56 shots per match, 4.5 shots more than any other team. They’re simply blowing everybody else out of the water. They’ve also done much of it without injured star Kevin De Bruyne who is just now coming back.

Juventus’s domination in Serie A is similar, if not quite as extreme. Their expected goal difference of 1.37 is half an expected goal better than anybody else’s. They take 21.78 shots per match which is 3.5 shots more than anybody else. Juventus are also the only team that concedes fewer than 10 shots per match, giving up 9.22. Also, while Manchester City are still climbing the European competition mountain, the modern-day version still has only progressed past the quarter finals once, a relatively tame semifinals appearance in Manuel Pellegrini’s last season, Juventus have been hovering just off the summit for the entire big three era. During the big three era, Juventus have twice come up one game short of Champions League glory, losing to both Barcelona and Real Madrid.

As this year’s version of the Champions League progresses, the question isn’t whether City and Juventus can catch the big three, it’s whether the big three have enough juice left in the tank to put together once more run to catch City and Juventus. And whether Barcelona, Bayern and Madrid are even the most likely teams to do so. Paris Saint-Germain remain a great team still waiting for European campaign that sees them perform to a level equal to the sum of their parts. Their level of domestic dominance this season isn’t quite as extreme as the big two but they’re still far and away the best team in France. And Kylian Mbappe is doing this.

Which, remarkably, is overshadowing that Neymar is doing this.

PSG have been great, and remain great. Their place in Europe’s pyramid remains fairly stable, just outside the very top and in with a Champions League shot if everything goes right. It’s just that while they’ve remained the same the teams ahead of them on the list are changing.

Liverpool also deserve prime contender status. They made the finals last year, and through a quarter of the season this year, are clearly England’s second best side. While City are hitting new heights and pulling away at the top, Liverpool have, at least in results matched them step for step. There’s no reason to think that they’re less of a contender for the Champions League than a side like Madrid. The equation is fairly simple, look at last year’s final, subtract Ronaldo from Madrid and add Salah (and a non-concussed goalkeeper) to Liverpool.

Atletico Madrid deserve honorable mention as a member of the chasing pack. They, like Juventus have twice been one match away from hoisting the Champions League trophy. They haven’t been able to capitalize on the erosion of the big three, however. While their grind it out style is always difficult to capture numerically, they have seemed to take small steps backwards so far this season. In attack their expected goals per game dropped from 1.16 last year to an even 1.00 this year. And in defense they’ve gone from 0.90 to 1.09.

Diego Simeone’s hard-nosed style will always give the team a fighting chance in a knockout competition but similarly to PSG, they’ve retained the status they’ve always had, rather than taking advantage of the chaos at the top of the pyramid to take a major step forward. Nowhere is that more evident than in the La Liga table where despite Barcelona and Madrid struggling, Atleti only sit fifth in the table with a disappointing 16 points from their first nine games.

The age of the big three is over. For almost a decade the super clubs of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich dominated the world stage. Now, those three are no longer the prohibitive favorites to win Europe’s biggest competition. That doesn’t mean they can’t ultimately hoist the trophy, of course, only that others have surpassed them as being the most likely candidates. Manchester City and Juventus are dominant teams this year. The big three, they’re just contenders like a handful of others. The shape of the challenge is clear. City and Juventus rule the roost, it’s Barcelona, Bayern, Madrid, PSG, Liverpool, and possibly Atleti who are the chasing pack.

Europe’s different this season. It’s about dang time.

Qualifying for the 2018–19 Champions League was a massive achievement for Inter Milan, a club that had been in the wilderness for the majority of the 2010s. It was a feather in the cap for Luciano Spalletti in his first season as Inter manager. The return of Champions League football meant that one of the giants in Italian football were finally back on the path towards success and big European nights under the lights. This was reflected in their transfer recruitment with the acquisition of talents like Radja Nainggolan, Keita Balde, Lautaro Martinez, and Stefan De Vrij: notable talents brought in with the hopes of building off of their successful 2017–18 campaign. This made Inter one of the more exciting clubs to follow coming into this season and while it was probably a bit much to ask them to become title contenders instantly, there wasn’t much reason to think that Inter shouldn't be able to complete for a top four spot once again

The results have been solid. Inter are in 3rd currently, on pace for 80 points which would be their highest point tally since winning the Scudetto in 2009–10. Their statistical profile looks solid enough for a club trying to finish in the top 4 in Italy. They’re controlling a healthy share of both shot quantity and shot quality. While Inter’s attack isn't exactly firing on all cylinders, it’s been perfectly functional as one that uses volume to eventually break down the opposition.

When Inter play from the back, they progress the ball at a deliberately slow pace, probing for passing lanes through the middle of the pitch and if nothing is present, they’ll recycle the ball backwards and start again. In Milan Škriniar and De Vrij, Inter have center backs who are comfortable in possession of the ball and have the requisite skillset to make passes that bypass defensive lines. If they’re playing against a side that is happy to cede territory, the center backs are comfortable enough carrying the ball into the opposition half. Their usage of fullbacks is interesting because at times it can look asymmetrical with Kwadwo Asamoah as a wing-back on the left side while Danilo D’Ambrosio is closer to the center-back pairing. When things are right, Inter can progress the ball into the opposition final third with relative ease. They even uncorked this play that I don’t remember seeing before, where Marcelo Brozović set a pick for Nainggolan to get him open and receive a pass in stride.

Inter’s match against Sampdoria, however, was an example of just how jumbled Inter's approach could get when matched with an opponent that combined both aggressive pressing and discipline in covering passing lanes. Off of goal kicks, Inter would split their center backs and bring a midfielder through the middle to present another option for the keeper, a common setup for teams playing out from the back. Sampdoria were ready for it and played an almost exclusive man marking setup that junked up their approach and didn’t allow many chances to find passing lanes through the middle. This caused Inter to turn the ball over on numerous occasions, even at times within their own final third.

Inter’s buildup as a whole has been okay though what is perhaps more fascinating with them is what goes on in the final third. In an age where there’s a greater sophistication about shot locations and the process that goes into accumulating good shots consistently, Inter ignore all that. Under Spalletti, they’ve been the highest usage crossing side in Serie A and they’ve continued that this season. Through eight games this season, Inter were tied with SPAL 2013 for the highest proportion of entries into the penalty box that come via crosses at 40%. While not a completely linear relationship, the general trend is that as you accumulate more talent as a club, you’ll tend to be less reliant on crosses as a vehicle towards generating shots in the penalty box. Inter are one of those teams that runs counter to that argument.

There’s an interesting cross sport comparison between crossing in soccer and isolation basketball (going one on one against your defender) in the NBA. It’s been proven that shots in the box that come from crosses on average have a lower likelihood of going in than shots in the box that don’t come from crosses. Crossing is hard and it’s not appreciated enough within mainstream football analysis how inefficient of a strategy it can be. This is especially true for headers given that shot quality is noticeably influenced by opponent pressure and just the act of heading a ball is hard. Among play types in basketball, isolation is among the most inefficient and something that’s been generally phased out i over the past five to 10 years. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either play in their respective sport so long as there’s some form of moderation that goes into it, or if you do have a scheme that features heavy usage of crossing or iso ball, you have the personnel to tilt the balance in your favor (2016–18 Real Madrid and the 2017–18 Houston Rockets are examples of this).

All of this is to say that through the first two months, the degree to which Inter have relied on crosses to gain access to the penalty box has started to hit the upper bounds of the personnel they have to work with, and it’s made Mauro Icardi look like an isolated figure at times up top. It explains to why despite having a healthy expected goal output per game, Inter’s xG per shot at just under 0.10 leaves a bit to be desired. When the ball gets to the wide areas, especially on the left wing, it’s a common sight to see Ivan Perisic get the ball in an isolated duel with his marker and launch a cross into the box. Among players who have played at least 300 minutes this season for Inter, no one has come close to completing as many crosses as Perisic.

At their worst, Inter will settle for the type of crosses that would make fans moan in disdain. The play will be labored with little to no flow, the ball gets to the flanks and is whipped into the box with a numerical disadvantage that makes it easy enough to defend. This has happened a fair amount with Inter this season and it represents the worst type of crossing. If as the opposition you’re forcing an attack to attempt crosses from long distance and you’re not outnumbered in the box, you’ve pretty much done your job.

This isn’t to say that all of their crossing attempts are low quality, because that would be false. Not all crosses are equal, just like not all isolation plays in basketball are the same and there’s some sophistication that goes on with Inter’s crossing. When Matias Vecino is part of the double pivot, he’ll come into the penalty box and turn a potential numerical disadvantage into a neutral setup and make it easier for the teammate to find a target for his cross. Inter have been able to create crossing opportunities that have been worthwhile. This for example was a nice play off of a throw in. Vecino drags his man just far enough that it allows Nainggolan to run into the free space and make a low cross off into the six yard box. The cross didn’t work but it’s one that came from a shorter distance and had some rhythm preceding the attempted pass.

This was another play that I thought was a nice way of turning a three against three into a potential dangerous shot. Inter have a tendency to cross/lob passes into the box from longer distances. Some of those attempts don’t have much of a chance of succeeding, but this one was different. Two of the three Inter players in the box are higher up which creates space to exploit near the six yard box. Perisic makes a run into that area and would’ve had a goal scoring opportunity had the pass not been blocked.

Inter are an interesting case of blending some of the modern day principles regarding ball progression with an old school penchant for finishing a high volume of sequences via crosses. Through the past year and change under Luciano Spalletti, the pluses have outweighed the minuses and the club is in a better position as a result of this gameplan in attack. The worry with having an attack so dependent on crossing is that there'll come a point where the returns start to diminish. In the event that Inter reach that point, can they conjure up a plan that is more focused on accumulating higher quality shots?

Inter haven't quite hit the heights that some may have hoped for coming into the season, as they're trying to gel and get some of the new additions that were brought in over the summer up to speed, but they've still been a functional attacking unit that grinds opponents into submission. Along with a solid defense, that's been good enough for 3rd place through nine games and an 80 point pace prorated to 38 games. The focus moving forward should be adding a bit more diversity to their attack, even if that does come at the cost of a little bit of their shot volume. From there, we could perhaps see Inter's attack kick into a higher gear.

  Header image courtesy of the Press Association

If you mention ‘sports data’ people tend to conjure up visions of robots, computer vision and magical new ways of creating data. People often ask us at StatsBomb what technology we use in our data collection, as if that is the most important part of the process.

Of course we have a brilliant team of highly skilled software engineers who have built our own proprietary data collection software and are constantly enhancing our process and data spec with new innovative technology. Our software is packed full of validation and intelligence that comes from combined decades of experience in using data to analyse Football for coaches, managers, and owners of clubs. But, even the latest, most high tech tracking data companies need humans to sort out collisions and things like tackle outcomes, especially when there are a bunch of players bunched together in a small area of the pitch.

The often overlooked gem in data collection is the role of people making these critical decisions in every single match. In some cases, around 90% of a game can be left to technology to capture and validate, but the remaining 10% is not always obvious, even to the trained eye. Take this example, did Giroud mean to pass his assist or shoot?

It’s a bit cliche to say the most important asset in any organisation is the people, but it’s true.

We went from being a data collection team of 5 to a team of 85 in just over eight months - hiring, training, and monitoring new recruits at this pace has been a huge challenge! Every collector has to go through intense training, tests, they watch hours and hours of video, and are measured not only on their speed, accuracy and attention to detail but on their attitude, their ability to work closely with their team and contribute towards common goals - to motivate not only themselves, but their team members as well.

We encourage everyone to have and share ideas, to contribute towards the continuous improvement of our products. I have worked at many companies who create an ‘Innovation Team' - at StatsBomb we purposely do the opposite. Everyone is encouraged to innovate - across our tech teams, data science and analysis teams, right through to our data collectors and helpdesk operators.

The psychology involved in this is fascinating - how do you create a motivating culture that includes leaders, innovators, young team members, experienced team members? How should we create bonus systems that reward performance on quality and quantity at individual, team and company level - given that not all teams have equal amounts of experience and every league has its own nuances in style of play that impact data collection? There are frameworks for reward management, all acknowledge the importance of business and cultural issues, but I still mostly find they ignore the people factor.

The impact of ‘one bad egg’ is legitimately worrying, and the retention programme is equally as important as recruitment and training. It’s not about fruit bowls, unlimited holiday, and standing-desks. Although that stuff is fun and contributes towards engagement, it can feel pretentious and a bit over the top in a new and growing business.

The relationship between the leaders and the team members really matters. Possibly still my favourite moment since the launch of StatsBomb was when our data collection leader gave his birthday speech - he knows every single member of the team personally and had genuine tears in his eyes as he told them all how building this team is his proudest achievement so far in his life.

StatsBomb is a data and tech company. We have clever tech and will continue to develop even more clever tech.  But behind this will always be our ever growing team of dedicated people, who care and worry about the happiness, motivation and well-being of the team itself. This is how you build defensible IP in data collection.

Which is why we have built (yes built) our data collectors a new office that doubled the size of our original collection centre. With more space, it houses everyone under the same roof - important for quality control across the whole company - with plenty of scope to double in size again as demand for sports data continues to grow. We are more than ready to build upon the early success of our new data operation. With our awesome workforce, we can now expand the number of leagues we cover, and start to go further back in history, and we are genuinely excited about the future!

If you want to know more about our data coverage and QA procedures do get in touch…

Charlotte

Chief Operating Officer

StatsBomb

charlotte@statsbomb.com