Playing With the Powerful Pass Type Tool: Reader Requests

We strive to be the Chick-fil-A of the football analytics blog world in that customer service is our pleasure. So when a few of the millions of readers (if my math is right, I believe the units on WordPress come in tens of thousands) ask for something, they get it ASAP. Tom asked about Leicester's pass maps, and even said pls, so it's our pleasure.

That long pass to wing from own half is pass that Leicester plays the most relative to rest of top 4 leagues, they play it 1.9% of the time, 8th highest. This is almost all down to Harry Maguire, who has played 25 of these passes (59 total for Leicester), only Leonardo Bonucci has played more. Others who play this type of pass a lot are Paul Pogba, Matias Silvestre (Empoli CB), Matthias Ginter (Gladbach CB), and James Tarkowski (Burnley CB). Overall this pass type is completed 72.9% of the time and leads to a shot within 15 seconds 8% of the time. Maguire and Leicester are below those numbers (56% completion for Maguire and only 1 of the 59 attempted passes has led to a shot within 15 seconds.

The pass to the right in the opponents half, Leicester play the 7th most (relatively!) in the Big 4 leagues. Wilfed Ndidi has played 20 of these passes, 12th most in the Big 4 leagues. Sergio Busquets and Fernandinho at 39 lead this category. The most common receivers are Ndidi, Iheanacho, Maddison, and Pereira (50 of 70 completions to these 4). Here Leicester complete a higher % than the average and also take a shot within 15 seconds following one of these passes slightly more often than the league average. This looks more like a team strength than the other pass type.

With Ben Chilwell shutting down Leicester's left side of their defense (why he's a defensive ace!) it's not surprising to see their right side see a lot of action. The small, fatter, bluest blob represents 5% of Leicester's total passes against, vs the average of 3.6%, the 4th highest number in top 4 leagues. Newcastle allows the highest %. The completion and chance creation numbers are pretty close to league average.

Uncie says Great Work!, thank you Uncie, it's greatly appreciated. He then asks for 2 Swedish teams which I'm sorry Uncie I don't have Swedish data available. But luckily he mentions Real Madrid, for which I do and which is likely more broadly interesting.

First, the offense.

Sort of an odd map with the 3 long pass types in the attacking area being highlighted. The same pass type we just looked at for Leicester is what is Madrid's largest abnormality: only Leipzig plays a higher % of these passes than Madrid's 5.6%. Man City, Man Utd, Napoli, Dortmund, Eibar, and Newcastle also play a high % of these passes. Quite an interesting group. These little dinks are almost always completed, and Real Madrid unsurprisingly are good: Asensio is 43/49, Nacho is 41/41, Kroos is 29/31, etc. Marcelo has played the 3rd-most of these type passes: only behind Marcos Alonso and Jordi Alba (though if you add the 2 Nacho's together you get 2nd place and gastrointestinal distress).

Let's look at that long, cross-field ball. It feels sort of odd to me that Real Madrid play that a lot, but the numbers will tell us more, that's why they are here. First, who is playing these passes? Kroos, mainly, with 25. Marcelo and Ramos have each played 12. The rest of the team have 22 combined. No one on any team has played more than Kroos's 25, Ruben Neves at 22 is in 2nd. Normal completion % is 67%, Kroos is 22/25. Other teams who play a lot of these: Villarreal (1.5% vs league average of 0.8%), Getafe, Fiorentina, Real Madrid are 4th, and Eibar. Bayern and Hoffenheim are only "good" teams you find in the top 20 besides Real Madrid. What does it mean? I don't really know, just interesting to see Kroos really loves this pass. Or maybe Dani Carvajal is just really good at getting open for them? He's received 21 of these passes, more than any other player in the league. Maybe having a mobile, attacking right-back is a key to opening this pass up? Jesus Navas, Kieran Trippier, Nelson Semedo, Trent-Alexander Arnold and Cesar Azpilicueta also receive lots of these passes.

This was supposed to be a quick post so I could get another post up tonight, but that's not going to happen now. Onto the Real Madrid defense:

It's kind of an odd chart really, where they allow a lot of types of passes starting around the center circle but then just in front don't. Let's try to chain these up a bit to see what we can learn.

We will look at this one pass type:

Here are the most common "next passes" in general:

Real Madrid truly haven't allowed quite enough of these type passes for me to feel comfortable graphing it out, but they as of now allow several of long, back-to-the-middle types that didn't even show up on the 7 next most common pass chart above. Anyway, that didn't pan out to reveal anything but it does kind of whet my appetite for further analysis like this.

And finally we get to Greed, a market-beater in La Liga according to his twitter profile (I want some of that market-beating as thanks for this).

Defensively, there's not really much volume wise to point out.

Offensively, there's a lot going on:

Getafe rarely play sideways balls in their own half, oddly especially not from left to right. They do love long balls towards the wings from their own half and from just inside the opposition half.

Look at how often they player the two long cross to wings in opponents half:

The gap is even larger for the long wing searchers that start inside their own half (of course not all do but the archetype does)

Look at Sampdoria at the end of both of those charts! Fascinating what you learn when you start blogging and get questions from Market-beating La Liga gamblers.

One last Q from Foot en Stats which deserves its own article but gets a tacked on answer at the end of a late-night blog that's gone on too long already:

We will just be tackling the final question. Zone 4 reminder, I hate having to do this every time but it has to be done:

and why he's asking this question:

Dortmund have a bizarrely low ratio of passes ending in Zone 3 compared to Zone 4. Basically they seem to hang back in Zone 4 a ton more than any other good team (or any other team period). So the pass types in general that most often end in Zone 4:

Now, unsurprisingly, Dortmund play these types of passes a lot. Here was their passing map:

The dark blue "retreating" passes are the ones that make up a larger% of Dortmund's Zone 4 passes than the average team. So basically they often pass towards the sides of the pitch within or at the edges of 4 and then right backwards to the passer.

Alright, this has gone on long enough, there was a question from Bundesliga expert Abel Meszaros about Hertha that I hope to get to soon. Tomorrow I'll write up the One Question Preview hopefully and that might have to wait til next week. Hope this at least gives you something interesting, any more questions I'm open, comment, write, tweet, etc, I want to give you something to help understand the game or your team more.