Rethinking Passing Combos, With Interactive Tool
Reading this article got me thinking on pass maps again. I like the emphasis on weighting for attack, but the static position of the players has always bothered me a bit in this one and the ones you see from StatsBomb and 11tegen11 online. They add a ton of context to a match report but forcing every player to be in their match-long overall average position can be quite misleading when you are focusing on just specific passing combos.
For example Jordi Alba is shown here in the same spot passing back towards Ramos as he is passing forward to Isco. This almost certainly isn't the case and of course we all know that but it can be very easy to create wrong mental pictures looking at these maps.
Obviously the best way to look a passing combo is just all the passes plotted together, but that can get messy as well if you want to compare with multiple others so I've split the difference here. You get passing combos drilled down to just 2 players, so the average start and end of the pass between the players and only on forward completions either in midfield or in attack. I split these up because presumably they are different phases of play. So these charts will hypothetically allow you to find the highest volume passing combos for your team when they are in midfield buildup and attacking phases of play and where the players actually are when they are making these passes.
The link is above if you want to dive in and get going. A few examples and discussion first. It divides pitch into "Midfield" which is zones 4-6 and Attack which is passes ending in zones 0-3. Only forward completions are considered. It's each teams most common passing combos on forward completions ending in these zones.
For example here are Liverpool's and Tottenham's. You can see Tottenham's right sided dominance: all 3 of their most common "attacking" pass combos are started by Kieran Trippier, no other team has one player as the most common for all 3 in either area.
A few other interesting things I've found puttering around.
Hazard bros: all the bolded pass paths involve a Hazard. The danger with average positions is it looks like Thorgan is passing to Hofmann in the box, when I assume they are spread between sides of the pitch.
Here we have Dortmund and Leipzig in midfield, you can see the difference as Dortmund plays these long, sideways balls within groupings (Akanji-Zagadou) indicating they've got control of ball and defense pushed back while Leipzig plays both shorter and more directly moving from block to block (Upamecano-Demme and Demme-Kampl) indicating their more aggressive style of attack.
Big 6 attacking combos all plotted at once.
A few things stand out: Trippier's corner at the bottom right, the long green pass is from much deeper than the rest: it's Pogba-Lukaku, the long blue pass sprayed wide left also intrigues with it's length: Xhaka-Monreal. Kyle Walker (both light blue lines on right side, to Fernandinho and B Silva) passes from much further inside than Trippier and Azpilicueta (orange line to Kante). Salah has shown up on a lot of passing metrics this year, his passes to Firmino look like the best ending position on this chart.
Go ahead and play with it! If you missed it before, link is here!