Chelsea: How to use football statistics when analyzing players
Does the football statistic indicate prowess?
The whole point of football or data analysis using football statistics is to determine who is good at what? To do this, it is important to know how to define what good in certain instances mean. How? Crossing ability for instance. A good crosser would complete more crosses than anyone else. This means that crossing accuracy or crossing success percentage is a good indicator. However, good crossing accuracy doesn’t look good at first glance.
The best crossers complete about 25 to 30-percent of their crosses, but that figure doesn’t seem so high. However when you compare that with other players, other players have significantly lower crossing accuracy. Comparing player’s numbers with the best players associated with a given event gives a clearer idea of what prowess is.
Another example is long passing. Virgil Dan Dijk is a very good long passer, and he has averaged about 57-percent of his long balls over the past three seasons (excluding the 2020/21 league season). He also completes a healthy number of them, though a healthy number is also dependent on comparison with other players. A player that picks his moments to make long balls very carefully, would likely have a very high long ball accuracy, but that does not indicate a good long passer/passer as much as someone who does it frequently enough, and at a very good rate.
Sometimes it is important to look at a player’s numbers over several season and average it out, so as to get a better context of a player’s prowess at something. Goals scored by strikers are also something that fans often take at face value. Often, strikers’ goal tallies are a combination of a striker’s finishing ability, as well as the numbers of chances they’re provided with. Therefore a striker scoring many goals doesn’t particularly indicate a good finisher. Robert Lewandowski is an example of this. Lewandowski is not best finisher in world football, however he gets so much chances that converting at a rate lower than is considered top drawer, is still enough to get him on the scoresheet a lot.
Applying all this to Chelsea, Lukaku for instance, has not been getting many chances to score and has missed some of the few he got, this explains why he hasn’t been scoring. This doesn’t indicate that he’s a bad striker. Prowess is measured when a player is performing on par or better than those recognized to be good at certain aspects of the game, over a considerable length of time.
There’s no need to get irritated whenever someone brings up statistics, because now you know how to apply important context to data. Context is also especially important when comparing players, as they play in the same team but have different styles of play.
If a player has similar passing numbers to Thiago Silva, chances are that he’s as good as Silva, or at least close to it. This is why it’s important to examine players’ numbers over long periods of time, longer than single seasons or groups of games. A player can maintain something over 6, 10 or even 15 games, but if the player maintains it over 50 or 60 games, then you can be sure it’s not a fluke. There’s a lot of other nuances or contexts that are important in using football statistics effectively, but they can’t all be covered.
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What do you think about how statistics should be used in football and what questions do you have on specific football events on the appropriate context needed in analyzing them. Let us in the comments and on Twitter