Footy & (useless) stats

Don't know what you guys think about the stats we get dished every match or the season aggregates for those. Imo they're all close to useless.

I'll pick an example: pass completion %. Says fuck all.

The only thing important is what the situation is (what opportunities/risks are there) before a player receives the ball & what the situation is afterwards.

Lots of complete passes are a step backwards, say a wasted opportunity on a fast break. Defenders with a great long pass, say Koeman, F de Boer, etc usually have a lower pass completion rate than those, who can't pass at all, because they just play easy passes. Same goes for midfielders & attackers.

About nothing is taken into account in pass completion percentage. time it took the player to come up with the pass (did he first keep the ball for a while, so the opposition's defence got time to organise, etc), quality of the pass (pace, is it the way the receiver wants it? in his feet or ahead of him), was it the right pass? shouldn't he have better opted for another pass.

Some complete passes are crap passes. There's also lots of difference in incomplete passes. Some are cardinal sins, for example the squared ball that gets intercepted when you've a lot of players ahead of the ball. While other incomplete passes are no problem at all, in fact next time the player should try to play the same pass again. (this is about a creative player trying to play a killer pass to create a 1 v1 or a very good chance)

In general if you want to judge passing it's best to watch the match (preferably in a stadium, because you've better overview of all the options).

Thoughts?

I agree. Plus I don't always know how they count the completion rate. Does it count as an accurate pass if the receiving player gets a touch but then immediately loses the ball because he is under great pressure (i.e. the passing player made a bad decision).

The other one I think is useless is number of shots. The other week, Marca were making a big fuss about how Sneijder took more shots than anyone else in the league. It was against Villarreal. Who gives a f*ck. None of them went in and the majority were either off target or they didn't trouble the goalkeeper at all. He took 12 shots! Great, have a sandwich!

Yep most shots stats are close to useless to. Even shots on target.

Accuracy stats from direct freekicks make sense if you compare similar positions.

Hey Guz did you see the thread i made just a little below on the thread page. it was an article from Tim Vickery pretty much talking about the same thing:

Analysis over numbers, goals before statistics

Tim Vickery 12 Jan 09, 11:24 AM Reader Bill Foley sent in the following question: "With regard to your recent piece on the superiority of European leagues v South American, does today's IFFHS stats not dent your argument quite a bit with [in a ranking of the world's strongest leagues] Argentina third and Brazil fifth?"

I think the biggest dent is in the brains of those responsible for such nonsense. Both countries have been placed too high - almost all their top players in their prime are in Europe, leaving the domestic game with youngsters on the way up, veterans on the way down and journeymen in between.


On top of that, the idea that Argentina's league is superior to Brazil's lacks credibility (and the idea that the Argentine league is better than Spain's defies all sanity). Check the facts - since the expansion of the Copa Libertadores, the continent's Champions League equivalent, in 2000, eight clubs from Brazil have reached the final, while Boca Juniors are the only team from Argentina to have done so.


This difference is not hard to explain. Brazil's population is almost five times bigger than Argentina's, so it has more strength in depth and finds it relatively easier to replace the players it sells abroad.

Meanwhile, the same ranking list has the Peruvian league in 15th place, and anyone acquainted with the weakness of contemporary Peruvian football will relish the nonsense of this. South American football only has 10 countries, and the Peruvian league would struggle to come 15th even there!

This ranking-ism - the desire to turn everything into a bogus statistic - is a scourge of the modern game.

A few months ago I contributed to a feature in World Soccer magazine on the world's 50 top derbies. I sent in copy on the South American clashes, other journalists did the same from other continents and the production staff in London decided on an order for them.

I thought it was a fascinating piece. It taught me much about social rifts around the globe and how they are reflected in football.

But when I saw how it was being debated on websites I was disappointed - there seemed to be no discussion on the content, and lots of rows and complaints of the type that game 42 was much more important than 27, and so on. A triumph for numbers over analysis.

This can also extend to the action on the field. There have been many times in the Maracana stadium when I have been sitting next to the team collecting match statistics. "Accurate pass by the number 5," the team leader would call out, though the ball had been blasted calf-height on the recipient's wrong foot, keeping the play so tight that loss of possession was inevitable, or "inaccurate pass by the number 8," after he had played an inspired ball inside the opposing full -back which might have set up a chance if his team-mate had been bright enough to read it.

Witnessing the match stats being compiled has made me acutely aware of their limitations. Football is too fluid for the rigidity of the statistical mind. Has the ball been used well? This depends, surely, on the situation of the game, the zone of the pitch - on considerations that cannot be reduced to a statistic.

If football were just numbers it would be bingo, and would not have become such a global passion. Even football's key statistic - goals - are not the be all and end all. It is often said that no one remembers who came second, but it's not true. The likes of Hungary in 1954 and Holland 20 years later lost World Cup finals, but their teams are still remembered fondly. Brazil didn't even make the semis in 1982 - but there are many all over the world that fell in love with football after seeing the beauty of the play from Socrates, Zico, Falcao etc.

Football is never just about what you do. It's also about how you do it - and that is a difficult concept to stick a number on.

Tim Vickery

I agree with the pass completion i think is especially used in Spain me thinks. i rememer when Diarra was just playing for the club in his first games AS were comparing his pass completion with Redondo i think or something. it was pap because anybody who saw those games knew that he only really made useless backpasses along with his partner Emerson.
If you have a player who makes a great pass but the teammate doesn't see it or misses it, it will go down as a bad pass in terms of stats. just like the shots statistic can be quite misleading. if you have a bunch of shots on goal without any of them being particularly troubling.

A danish coach ones said "Statistik er som miniskørter. De giver dig gode idéer, men skjuler det vigtigste"

Translated it means Stats are like miniskirts. they give you good ideas but they hide the most important thing"

In Tennis there's even better example of complete nonsense statistics : converted breakpoints %.

TV pundits and commentators use that figure quite a lot : it's BOGUS !!!

Say you get to love-forty and immediately make the break....they credit you with a 33% because you didn't use two breakpoints

(and I still don't get why 30-30 isn't called juice, it's exactly the same situation as 40-40)

Missed the last bit, thought it was about comparing countries/leagues.

Makes sense.

Axeslammer wrote:In Tennis there's even better example of complete nonsense statistics : converted breakpoints %.

TV pundits and commentators use that figure quite a lot : it's BOGUS !!!

Say you get to love-forty and immediately make the break....they credit you with a 33% because you didn't use two breakpoints

(and I still don't get why 30-30 isn't called juice, it's exactly the same situation as 40-40)

didn't know that that's so funny.

Assists are always a bit blunt a stat for my liking too. If it's just counted as the player who passed the ball last to the score, you get an assist for doing a 5 yard pass to your team-mate who fires in an impossibly good shot from 40 yards.

Or you take on 8 players, pull the ball back perfectly for the simplest of tap-ins - and the striker misses. No assist.

They're a guide, nothing more.

Axeslammer wrote:In Tennis there's even better example of complete nonsense statistics : converted breakpoints %.

TV pundits and commentators use that figure quite a lot : it's BOGUS !!!

Say you get to love-forty and immediately make the break....they credit you with a 33% because you didn't use two breakpoints

(and I still don't get why 30-30 isn't called juice, it's exactly the same situation as 40-40)

Didn't know they did that with breakpoint %. Nonsense if so. It's one thing to say how many breakpoint opportunities you created, i.e. at 0-40, you've made yourself 3 opportunities. But for conversion rate, you can only count the number of breakpoints actually played

By the way, it deuce, not juice
But I don't know why 30-30 isn't just called deuce.

I'm in agreement about limitations of stats. I specifically agree with Jaime on the weight of the pass and awareness. Supposing it is hard to be controlled or passed to a zone under pressure, it could be dispossessed by the opposing defender after first touch. Still it counts a completed pass for the passer, and possession lost for the receiver (For no fault of his own).

Useless stat number one


Ronaldo's 42 goals in the 07/08 season.


Completely useless is what that stat is.

debaser wrote:

By the way, it deuce, not juice

Didn't know that....and don't really care either : it makes no sense either way

juice

Axeslammer wrote:

debaser wrote:

By the way, it deuce, not juice

Didn't know that....and don't really care either : it makes no sense either way

Well you should! Tweedle will laugh at you if you write 'juice'. And nobody wants that

Anyway, I've found a possible answer to the 30-30/deuce thing...

"Some tennis matches or leagues employ "No-Ad" scoring. Each game proceeds as in regular tennis scoring, but if the score reaches deuce, then the winner of the next point, the seventh in the game, wins the game."

In these games 30-30 would not be the same as deuce.

Why can't they just say 40 a piece?

debaser wrote:Assists are always a bit blunt a stat for my liking too. If it's just counted as the player who passed the ball last to the score, you get an assist for doing a 5 yard pass to your team-mate who fires in an impossibly good shot from 40 yards.

Or you take on 8 players, pull the ball back perfectly for the simplest of tap-ins - and the striker misses. No assist.

They're a guide, nothing more.

Super Madrid wrote:Stats are like miniskirts. they give you good ideas but they hide the most important thing

Henry's Arsenal stats (especially the later years) are influenced positively by the entire team playing for him.

De Guzman wrote:Henry's Arsenal stats (especially the later years) are influenced positively by the entire team playing for him.

His assist stats also went down drastically when the EPL became the best league in the world (04/05 onwards).

tennis is a ridiculous game anyway. As long as you score the last point, you win. Imagine doing that in football.

stats, on the other hand, are great. It provides great food for discussion.

Pierre Littbarski wrote:

De Guzman wrote:Henry's Arsenal stats (especially the later years) are influenced positively by the entire team playing for him.

His assist stats also went down drastically when the EPL became the best league in the world (04/05 onwards).

Yeah Pierre, It had nothing with the fact that we replaced two of the highest scoring wingers in Europe(who benefited a lot from his assists) by wingers who couldn't score for toffee. He still finished the 2004/2005 season with 14 assists(something 'Cheva', 'Sheva' etc could only dream of). And the following season he was virtually our only goal scorers in the team, people like Adebayor(your great friend) missed unmissable chances he laid for them on a plate - see the Liverpool game for example. Henry scored 27 goals in 32 games(not all were starts) - his best season in terms of goals to games at the club, and he had to do it all on his own otherwise we'd have been fucked. And he hardly played the following season.

So there goes your little theory Pierre, you've been holding on it for far too long, let it go and try to come up with something better.

De Guzman wrote:Henry's Arsenal stats (especially the later years) are influenced positively by the entire team playing for him.

Pierre Littbarski syndrome.

So let us see, Arsene set up the whole team to play for him by doing the following:

- Change from a direct style of play(which what get the best of Henry) to slow, possession game which negate Henry's best qualities.

- Consistently play a roaming forward like Henry - whose best games are when he's allowed to come from wide positions - as a lone striker in a 4-5-1 systyem. He always struggle to play in that position.

In short, Arsene Wenger set up the whole team to play for Henry by playing him in a position and system that negates his best qualities, that's genuis!

Henry is good in a direct team but poor for a possession team?

You're admitting he is a pace-merchant then ?

Pierre Littbarski wrote:Henry is good in a direct team but poor for a possession team?

You're admitting he is a pace-merchant then ?

He's best in a direct team like ManU are at the moment, but he can also play well in other systems as well as he showed when he dragged us to 4th and led us to the 2006 CL final. He is/was world class after all.

The Professor wrote:

Pierre Littbarski wrote:Henry is good in a direct team but poor for a possession team?

You're admitting he is a pace-merchant then ?

He's best in a direct team like ManU are at the moment, but he can also play well in other systems as well as he showed when he dragged us to 4th and led us to the 2006 CL final . He is/was world classafter all.

The Professor wrote:

Pierre Littbarski wrote:Henry is good in a direct team but poor for a possession team?

You're admitting he is a pace-merchant then ?

He's best in a direct team like ManU are at the moment, but he can also play well in other systems as well as he showed when he dragged us to 4th and led us to the 2006 CL final. He is/was world class after all.

4th place - what an achievement.

Why do you mention the 2006 CL final? he lost you that game single handedly.