Author: Will Morgan

Analysing centre backs is a subject likely to provoke either a shrug or a wistful smile from an analytics practitioner. To varying degrees, there are numbers and metrics aplenty for other positions but in public analytics at least, development has been limited and a genuine track record of successful application is yet to be found. If centre back analysis is the holy grail of public football analytics, then the search thus far has been more Monty Python than Indiana Jones.

One of the major issues with centre back analysis is that positioning isn't measured directly by on-ball event data and any casual football watcher can tell you that positioning is a huge part of the defensive art. Tracking data would be the ideal means to assess positioning but it comes at a high-cost both computationally and technically, while having a much smaller coverage in terms of leagues than simpler event data provision.

StatsBomb's new pressure event data serves as a bridge between the traditional on-ball event data and the detailed information provided by tracking data, offering a new prism to investigate the style and effectiveness of centre backs. While it won’t provide information on what a defender is up to when he is not in the immediate vicinity of the ball, it does provide extra information on how they go about their task.

Starting at the basic counting level, centre backs averaged six pressure actions per ninety minutes in the Premier League last season. Tackles and interceptions clock in at 0.8 and 1.3 per 90 respectively, which immediately illustrates that pressure provides a great deal more information to chew on when analysing more ‘proactive’ defending. I’m classing clearances and blocking shots as ‘reactive’ given they mostly take place in the penalty area and are more-directly driven by the opponent, while aerial duels are a slightly different aspect of defending that I’m going to ignore for the purposes of this analysis.

The figure below maps out where these defensive actions occur on the pitch and is split between left and right centre backs. Pressure actions typically occur in wider areas in the immediate vicinity of the penalty area, with another peak in pressure just inside the top corner of the 18-yard box. This suggests that centre backs don’t engage too high up the pitch in terms of pressure and are generally moving out towards the flanks to engage opponents in a dangerous position and either slow-down an attack, cut down an attackers options or directly contest possession.

The location of pressure actions is somewhat similar to the picture for interceptions, although the shape of the latter is less well-defined and tends to extend higher up the pitch. Tackles peak in the same zone just outside the top corners of the penalty area but are also less spatially distinct. Tackles also peak next to the edge of the pitch, a feature that is less distinct in the pressure and interception maps.

Partners in Crime

The number of pressure actions a centre back accumulates during a match will be driven by their own personal inclinations and role within the team, as well as the peculiarities of a given match and season e.g. the tactics of their own team and the opposition or the number of dangerous opportunities their opponent creates. The figure below explores this by plotting each individual centre back’s pressure actions per ninety minutes against their team name. The team axis is sorted by the average number of pressure actions the centre backs on each team make over the season.

At the top end of the scale, we see Arsenal and Chelsea, two teams that regularly played a back-three over the past season. Nacho Monreal and César Azpilicueta led the league in pressure actions per ninety minutes by a fair distance and it appears the additional cover provided by playing in a back-three and their natural instincts developed as full backs meant they were frequently putting their opponents under pressure. Manchester United top the list in terms of those predominantly playing with two centre backs, with all of their centre backs applying pressure at similar rates.

At the other end of the scale, Brighton and Leicester’s centre backs appear to favour staying at home in general. Both though are clear examples of there being an obvious split between the number of pressure actions by the primary centre backs on a team, with one being more aggressive while the other presumably holds their position and plays a covering role. This division of roles is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by Chelsea’s centre backs, with Azpilicueta and Antonio Rüdiger as the side centre backs being more proactive than their counter-part in the central defensive slot (Cahill or Christensen).

Liverpool’s improved defensive performance over the course of the season has been attributed to a range of factors, with the signing of Virgil Van Dijk for a world-record fee garnering much of the credit. Intriguingly, his addition to the Liverpool backline has seemingly offered a significant contrast to the club’s incumbents, who all favoured a slightly greater than average number of pressure actions. Furthermore, Van Dijk ranked towards the bottom of the list in terms of pressure actions for Southampton (4.5 per 90) as well, with his figure for Liverpool (3.7 per 90) representing a small absolute decline. As an aside, Van Dijk brings a lot to the table in terms of heading skills, where he ranks highly for both total and successful aerial duels, so he is still an active presence in this aspect, while being a low-event player in others.

Centre backs are often referred to as a partnership and the above illustrates how defensive units often setup to complement each others skill sets and attempt to become greater than the sum of their parts.

The Thompson Triangle

Mark Thompson has led the way in terms of public analytics work on centre backs and has advocated for stylistic-driven evaluations as the primary means of analysis, which can then be built on with more traditional scouting. Pressure actions add another string to this particular bow and the figure below contrasts the three proactive defensive actions discussed earlier. Players in different segments of the triangle are biased towards certain actions, with those in the corners being more strongly inclined towards one action over the other two.

There is a lot to pour over in the figure, so I’ll focus on defenders who are most inclined towards pressure actions. One clear theme is that such centre backs frequently featured on the sides of a back-three. Ryan Shawcross is unusual in this aspect given he was generally the middle centre back in Stoke’s back-three, as well as the right centre back in a back four. Ciaran Clark at Newcastle and Kevin Long at Burnley are the only players who featured mostly as one of two centre backs, with their partner adopting a more reserved role.

The additional cover provided by a back-three system and the frequent requirement for the player on the flanks to pull wide and cover in behind their wing-back seemingly plays a large part in determining the profile of centre backs. This illustrates the importance of considering team setup in determining a defenders profile and should feed into any recruitment process alongside their individual inclinations.

The analysis presented provides descriptive metrics and illustrations of the roles played by centre backs and is very much a first look at this new data. While we can't gain definitive information on positioning without constant tracking of a player, the pressure event data provides a new lens to evaluate centre backs and significantly increases the number of defensive actions that can be evaluated further. Armed with such information, these profiles can be built upon with further data-driven analysis and combined with video and in-person scouting to build a well-rounded profile on the potential fit of a player.

Now all we need is a shrubbery.

The concept of pressing has existed in football for decades but its profile has been increasingly raised over recent years due to its successful application by numerous teams. Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola in particular have received acclaim across their careers, with pressing seen as a vital component of their success. There are numerous other recent examples, such as the rise of Atlético Madrid, Tottenham Hotspur and Napoli under Diego Simeone, Mauricio Pochettino and Maurizio Sarri respectively.

Alongside this rise, public analytics has sought to quantify pressing through various metrics. Perhaps the most notable and widely-used example was ‘passes per defensive action’ or PPDA, which was established by Colin Trainor and first came to prominence on this very website. Anecdotally, PPDA found its way inside clubs and serves as an example of public analytics penetrating the private confines of football. Various metrics have also examined pressing through the prism of ‘possessions’, which Michael Caley has put to effective use on numerous occasions. Over the past year, I sought to illustrate pressing by quantifying a team’s ability to disrupt pass completion. While this was built on some relatively complex numerical modelling, it did provide what I thought was a nice visual representation of the effectiveness of a team’s pressing.

While the above metrics and others have their merits, they tend to ignore that pressing can take several forms and are biased towards the outcome, rather than the actual process. The one public example that side-steps many of these problems is the incredible work by the Anfield Index team through their manual collection of Liverpool’s pressing over the past few seasons but this has understandably been limited to one team.

Step-forward the new pressure event data supplied by StatsBomb Services. This new data is an event that is triggered when a player is within a five-yard radius of an opponent in possession. The radius varies as errors by the opponent would prove more costly, with a maximum range of ten-yards that is usually associated with goalkeepers under pressure. As well as logging the players involved in the pressure event and its location, the duration of the event is also collected.

The data provides an opportunity to explore pressing in greater detail than ever before. Different teams use different triggers to instigate their press, which can now be isolated and quantified. Efficiency and success can be separated from the pressing process in a number of ways at both the team and player-level. Such tools can be used in team-evaluation, opposition scouting and player recruitment.

One such application of the new data is to explore gegenpressing or counter-pressing, which is the process where a team presses the opposition immediately after losing possession. The initial aim of counter-pressing is to disrupt the opponent’s counter-attack, which can be a significant danger during the transition phase from attack-to-defence when a team is more defensively-unstable. Ideally possession is quickly won back from the opponent, with some teams seeking to exploit such situations to attack quickly upon regaining possession. Five seconds is often used as a cut-off for the period where pressure on the opposition is most intensely applied during the counter-press.

The exciting new dimension provided by StatsBomb’s new pressure data is that the definition of counter-pressing you would find in a coaching manual can be directly drawn from the data i.e. a team applies pressure to their opponent following a change in possession. The frequency at which counter-pressing occurs can be quantified and then we can develop various metrics to examine the success or failure of this process. Furthermore, we can analyse counter-pressing at the player-level, which has been out-of-reach previously.

The figure below illustrates where on the pitch counter-pressing occurs based on data from 177 matches from the Premier League this past season. The pitch is split into six horizontal zones and is orientated so that the team out-of-possession is playing from left-to-right. The colouring on the pitch shows the proportion of open-play possessions starting in each zone where pressure is applied within five seconds of a new possession.

The figure illustrates that pressure is most commonly applied on possessions starting in the midfield zones, with marginally more pressure in the opposition half. Possessions beginning in the highest zone up the pitch come under less pressure, which is likely driven by the lower density of players in this zone on average. Very few possessions actually begin in the deepest zone and a smaller proportion of them come under pressure quickly than those in midfield.

From a tactical perspective, pressing is generally reserved for areas outside of a team’s own defensive third. The exact boundary will vary but for the following analysis, I have only considered possessions starting higher up the pitch, as denoted by the counter-pressing line in the previous figure.

In the figures below, the proportion of possessions in the counter-pressing zones where pressure is applied within five seconds is referred to as the ‘counter-pressing fraction’. In the sample of matches from the Premier League this season, a little under half (0.47) of open-play possessions come under pressure from their opponent within five seconds. At the top of the counter-pressing rankings, we see Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool, which is unsurprising given the reputations of their managers. At the bottom end of the scale, we find a collection of teams that have mostly been overseen by British managers who are more-known for a deep-defensive line.

On the right-hand figure above, the strong association between counter-pressing and possession is illustrated, with the two showing a high correlation coefficient of 0.86 in this aggregated sample. Interpreting causality here is somewhat problematic given the likely circular relationship between the two parameters; teams that dominate possession may have more energy to press intensively, leading to a greater counter-pressing fraction, which would lead to them winning possession back more quickly, which will potentially increase their possession share and so on. The correlation is weaker for individual matches (0.36), which hints at some greater complexity and is something that can be returned to at a later date.

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the above figures is Burnley’s high counter-pressing fraction. The majority of analysis on Burnley has focused on their defensive structure within their own box and how that affects their defensive performance in relation to expected goals (xG). The figure illustrates that Burnley employ a relatively aggressive counter-press, especially in relation to their possession share.

Examining Burnley’s counter-pressing game in more detail reveals that they counter-press 18 possessions per game, which is above average and only slightly lower than Manchester City. However, they only actually regain possession within five seconds 2.5 times per game, which falls short of what you might expect on average and falls below their counter-pressing peers. In terms of the ratio between their counter-pressing regains and total counter-pressing possessions, they sit 17^th on 14%.

Burnley’s counter-press is the fourth least-effective at limiting shots, with 13% of such possessions ending with them conceding a shot compared to the average rate of 10%. However, one thing in their favour is that these possessions are typically around the league average in terms of their length and speed of attack, which will allow Burnley to regain their vaunted defensive organisation prior to conceding such shots.

The more dominant discourse around pressing is as an attacking rather than defensive weapon, so narratives are often formed around teams that regularly win back the ball through pressing and use this to generate fast attacks e.g. Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur. As a result, a team like Burnley who seemingly employ counter-pressing as a defence-first tactic to prevent counter-attacks and slow attacking progress may be overlooked.

Burnley’s manager, Sean Dyche, has typically been lumped-in with the tactical stylings of the perennially-employed British managers who aren’t generally associated with pressing tactics. Dyche was reportedly most impressed by the pressing game employed by Guardiola’s Barcelona and he has seemingly implemented some of these ideas at Burnley. He has instilled an approach that combines counter-pressing and a low-block with numbers behind the ball, which is a neat trick to pull-off; Diego Simeone and Atlético Madrid are perhaps the more apt comparison given such traits.

The above analysis illustrates the ability of StatsBomb’s new pressure event data to illuminate an important aspect of the modern game. Furthermore, it is able to do this in a manner that directly translates tactical principles, separating underlying process and outcome, which is a giant step-forward for analytics. It also led to an analysis discussing the similarity between Guardiola’s legendary Barcelona team and Sean Dyche’s Burnley, which was probably unexpected to say the least.

This is just a taster of what is possible with StatsBomb’s new data. There's more information in this presentation from the StatsBomb launch event and you can expect more analysis to appear over the summer and beyond.

Models that attempt to measure passing ability have been around for several years, with Devin Pleuler's 2012 study being the first that I recall seeing publicly. More models have sprung up in the past year, including efforts by Paul Riley, Neil Charles and StatsBomb Services. These models aim to calculate the probability of a pass being completed using various inputs about the start and end location of the pass, the length of the pass, the angle of it, as well as whether it is played with the head or foot.

Most applications have analysed the outputs from such models from a player passing skill perspective but they can also be applied at the team level to glean insights. Passing is the primary means of constructing attacks, so perhaps examining how a defense disrupts passing could prove enlightening?

In the figure below, I've used a pass probability model (see end of post for details and code) to estimate the difficulty in completing a pass and then compared this to the actual passing outcomes at a team-level. This provides a global measure of how much a team disrupts their opponents passing. For 2016-17, we see the Premier League's main pressing teams with the greatest disruption, through to the barely corporeal form represented by Sunderland.

The next step is to break this down by pitch location, which is shown in the figure below where the pitch has been broken into five bands with pass completion disruption calculated for each. The teams are ordered from most-to-least disruptive.

We see Manchester City and Spurs disrupt their opponents passing across the entire pitch, with Spurs' disruption skewed somewhat higher. Liverpool dominate in the midfield zones but offer little disruption in their deepest-defensive zone, suggesting that once a team breaks through the press, they have time and/or space close to goal; a familiar refrain when discussing Liverpool's defense.

Chelsea offer an interesting contrast with the high-pressing teams, with their disruption gradually increasing as their opponents inch closer to their goal. What stands out is their defensive zone sees the greatest disruption (-2.8%), which illustrates that they are highly disruptive where it most counts.

The antithesis of Chelsea is Bournemouth who put together an average amount of disruption higher up the pitch but are extremely accommodating in their defensive zones (+4.5% in their deepest-defensive zone). Sunderland place their opponents under limited pressure in all zones aside from their deepest-defensive zone where they are fairly average in terms of disruption.

The above offers a glimpse of the defensive processes and outcomes at the team level, which can be used to improve performance or identify weaknesses to exploit. Folding such approaches into pre-game routines could quickly and easily supplement video scouting.   ____________________________________________

Appendix: Pass probability model

For this post, I built two different passing models; the first used Logistic Regression and the second used Random Forests. The code for each model is available here and here.

Below is a comparison between the two, which compares expected success rates with actual success rates on out-of-sample test data.

The Random Forest method performs better than the Logistic Regression model, particularly for low probability passes. This result is confirmed when examining the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curves in the figure below. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) for the Random Forest model is 87%, while the Logistic Regression AUC is 81%.

Given the better performance of the Random Forest model, I used this in the analysis in the main article.