Going clustering to spread winter cheer: Premier League passing styles in attack

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…almost! The time when we have a good enough sample of passing data to start looking at what teams like to do. This has long been one of my favorite tools to see the game and what teams want to do/are forced into doing.

The process: every CL/PL/Bundesliga open play pass is clustered on start and endpoint. There are 80 clusters, this number has been chosen through trial and error over the years…arguably it’s a bit too low as you do get some odd passes slipping into clusters but it gets a decent enough sample size. We then look at how teams vary from the average in how they pass…today just looking at offense and just looking at pass totals.

Here are all the clusters

Now one thing to clearly remember is a pass type is not the same across teams. Let’s look at this type of pass (lumping opposite sides of the pitch together here)

Unsurprisingly City play it the most, but it’s a quite different type

-they complete it 93% of the time

-it leads to a buildup score that is roughly 70% of the average for this type of pass

I don’t know the average number of players in the zone, but this probably isn’t atypical for a City situation

But when Forest play this pass they are completing it just 84% of the time, but the buildup score is 143% of the league average.

This might not be typical but it’s a situation Forest will be in a lot more than City.

St. Pauli (who will come in a later post) have completed it 59% of the time at 55% of the league average buildup score.

Premier League

This is as a share of total passes remember, otherwise Man City would be blue everywhere, Ipswich orange everywhere if it was just raw totals.

The Feed Saka ball is still there.

The center of the pitch overload from Villa is a good way of thinking about their passing attack.

Verticality down the left side and box entries from there for Bournemouth’s very high-tempo overall game. The high-tempo attack and defense work pretty well together.

Frank-ball so clearly thinks teams playing sideways passes around the center circle are killing their attacks, they never play them and set up their defense to funnel opponents there.

A bit of the de Zerbi goalie/CB circulation remains in the New Era Brighton.

Maresca ball looks quite similar to Leicester ball.

Dyche has turned the verticality up to an almost comical degree. Onana going from this system to Villa’s central passing system had to be like the transition on a Finnish spa day.

Antonee Robinson is doing it again. This time with Iwobi/Nelson instead of Willian but Fulham have built a pretty heavy left sided attacking bridge back to back seasons with the American down the left.

The sign of an overmatched team who just can’t get out of their own third.

A pass map that looks a bit like the Chelsea one…Maresca ball hangover with Steve Cooper just basically leaving things as is?

Liverpool have become kind of boring with the ball, there is still a bit of the Klopp muscle memory with how they counter at times. We saw a near perfect fusion of the Slot tough-to-break-down defense with the swashbuckling Klopp attack vs AC Milan and Leverkusen in the Champions League but in the league, Liverpool don’t quite look ready to blow teams away as they have in the past. That might be fine though in a year where their two main competitors have kind of collapsed a bit.

Man City are almost always like this anyway, now teams arguably have more of an incentive to sit back as their transitional defense and shot quality suppression has slipped a lot without Rodri. And of course they have played without their two best defense busters in Rodri and KdB.

Sort of a weird team so far this year that seems to be finding their form, but a lot of sideways passes on their own half and hit vertical balls.

One of the more unique pass maps here, Forest of course never spend any time passing for possessions sake in their own half or horizontally at the center circle, they spray long balls and attack massively down their left side where Callum Hudson-Odoi has set up shop. He along with Anderson, Gibbs-White, Moreno and Dominguez tilt the attack very strongly to the left side.

Why do Jan Bednarek, Flynn Downes and co always wind up with so many completed passes? Well…there it is.

A horizontal line of sadness shy of even their side of the center circle.

Sort of wild and chaotic at first glance, you can clearly see Spurs like short, connective passes in and around the box.

When you play Tomas Soucek and Guido Rodriguez in the midfield two, what do you expect, peak Barca interplay? No, instead you get Emerson and Kudus getting released down the left a huge amount from a variety of passers.