Possession & Performance Buzz Wins in Football Index

Introduction:

Within this piece of analysis, I will attempt to look at the relationship between possession and the probability of winning Performance Buzz (PB). Previously, I have looked at individual elements of the PB matrix for past PB Winners. However, with that I only touched on particular elements briefly. With this analysis, we will hope to cover this topic with greater depth. In the previous analysis work I carried out, I was able to point out the positive correlation between PB scores and passes, which is also very similar to the relationship between PB scores and possession.

Furthermore, the data I will be using for this analysis was collected from the sources, Index Gain and WhoScored. This has then allowed me to construct the following table and begin to look into our research question.

The data within the table has been collected based on the Top 20 teams for possession so far this season.

Data:

Leagues:

- Premier League Teams: 5 (Liverpool, Leicester, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal)

- Ligue 1 Teams: 4 (PSG, Bordeaux, Lyon, Nice)

- Bundesliga Teams: 3 (Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen)

- La Liga Teams: 4 (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Sevilla, Sociedad)

- Serie A Teams: 4 (Juventus, Atalanta, Napoli, Sassuolo)

Possession:

- Ranges from 62.80% to 54.10%

Formation:

- 433: 11 Teams

- 4231: 5 Teams

Team Dividends (2019/20):

- Barcelona: £0.78

- Bayern: £0.75

- Man City: £0.65

- Juventus: £0.62

- PSG: £0.57

(All last year’s league winners)

Win Ratios (2019/20):

- Liverpool: 86.96%

- PSG: 82.61%

- Juventus: 77.27%

- Leicester: 70.59%

- Barcelona: 68.18%

Analysis:

I will begin my analysis by looking at the previous relationships found in past analysis, between possession and PB scores, and between passes and PB scores. The two scatter plots, showing a positive correlation can be found below.

At first, it would seem obvious that by having more possession of the ball, you are able to score more points on the PB matrix due to the opportunity to make more passes. It is also an obvious statement to make that the opposing team cannot score if you are in possession of the ball. This could perhaps open a further question in that do teams with a higher average possession keep more clean sheets? I would suggest that on average this would be true, however, it could also be that the teams with more possession have better quality players, thus better-quality defenders in order to keep clean sheets. The idea of having better quality defenders and not purely being down to having more possession is supported by teams Nice and Sassuolo. Nice have kept just 2 clean sheets all season, and Sassuolo just 4, despite both teams being 14thin their respective leagues and in the Top 20 teams for average possession.

If we are to take a look at the relationship between PB Scores and Possession, we can see that the majority of the 200+ scores are within teams having 60% or more possession. From taking data I have produced on PB Winners, the average possession for a PB Winner’s team is 60.15%. Therefore, we could suggest that Bayern, PSG, Barcelona and Man City on average meet this requirement. This would then not surprise us that these are 4 of the top 5 Performance Dividend earning teams so far this season, just missing Juventus who are the previous Champions of Serie A for the last 8 seasons. It is interesting to note that the Top 5 Performance Dividend earning teams this season are the previous seasons Champions of their respective leagues. To further this line of analysis we could look at the number of team that have had more than 60% possession in a game. I have taken the time to look at Bayern. They have 20 matches out of 22 matches this season with having more than 60% possession, the only games that weren’t above 60% were against Dortmund and Tottenham, which they had 59% possession in both.

After consideration I included the regular formations used by each team, to see if that also had an effect on possession and PB scores. As mentioned earlier, 11 teams use the 433 formation and 5 teams use the 4231 formation. The rest use slightly different formation variations, which they are lower down on the average possession rankings. From this, I would suggest the two more common formations are instrumental in allowing the ball to be retained. A reason for this would be due to the player that is positioned in the deeper role/s in midfield. Their job would be to help protect the defensive line, but also to help transition to the ball from defence to midfield safely without having to play more riskier passes beyond 10/15 yards. This is supported due to the large number of players playing in this role also being the player making the most passes on average within a game. However, due to their duty of protecting the backline, they are unable to travel further forward and contribute to large number of goals. Thus, there is no surprise that less of the transitional players are also the player to have scored the highest PB Score this season. This further suggests as small standard deviation within their PB score than players such as creative players or goal-scorers.

We shall now look into the involvement of Win Ratios. For this I have created a scatter diagram to display the relationship between the win ratio and average possession, shown below.

From the diagram, we can see that there appears to be a positive correlation between win ratios and average possession. The few data points that are a little off of trend are Liverpool’s huge win ratio of nearly 87%, yet only averaging 57.6% possession. From ranking 8thin the possession table, it may also be a reason behind them ranking 9thin the team Performance Dividend rankings. Trent Alexander-Arnold accounts for 54.8% of Liverpool’s Performance Dividends and would perhaps account for more if we were to exclude Wijnaldum’s win with the Netherlands squad during the Euro Qualification process. We could also suggest that Leverkusen are under-performing this season. They are the 5thhighest ranked team with regards to average possession, yet 14thfor win ratio and 19thfor performance dividends earned. The dividends earned in a massive anomaly giving the high levels of possession they have within matches. Perhaps due to their low win ratio a lot of their players could benefit from the added win bonus, thus giving them a final edge to generate PB wins. They lack of goals is also a major concern, due to being the lowest scoring team within the Top 20 teams for average possession and could also explain their poor dividends return.

Moving the analysis on, due to the positive correlation between passes and PB scores, we would also suspect the same or a similar relationship between key passes, crosses and PB scores. We can first generate scatter diagrams to gain a further understanding of the relationship.

Although, from the diagrams, we can see that there does not really appear to be any kind of relationship between average possession and number of key passes or number of crosses. Perhaps this is due to each team often having a key man regardless of how much possession they have throughout a match. Something that could further be looked into is the number of key passes and crosses for an entire team. For those with higher number of key passes and crosses would perhaps suggest that the possession a team has in likely to be further forward down the pitch, rather than keeping possession round the defence. This could be the case for Leverkusen, as they have a very high average possession, yet do not score as often as the teams around that level of possession do. This may also be down to managerial styles and tactics.

Conclusion:

Overall, I would suggest that having large amounts of possession strongly increases the chances of being able to win Performance Buzz dividends. Although, I would also suggest that it does not mean that these teams are the only teams that are capable of large amounts of possession within a game. It could be that there are favourable match-ups for sides such as a team in 8thor 9thplaying a side in the bottom 3 at home.

I would also suggest looking for teams that are looking to play in an expansive way, such as Conte’s project at Inter. This may help to increase the PB scores of the players. It will also help those teams dominate the favourable match-ups and benefit from large amounts of possession. On the other hand, it also appears that Man United are looking at developing a more counter-attacking style of play due to have extremely fast forwards. This has then prevented them from being in the Top 20 teams for average possession and the average PB scores of their players being rather low considering they are sat 6thin the Premier League and playing Europa League football against weaker teams. Although, I am aware they played a lot of youngsters in the Europa League, and if they played a stronger squad then perhaps we would have seen some more Performance Buzz wins from Man United.

It was also interesting to see the dominant teams are also playing the same type of formations, with having a player to transition the ball between defence and the midfield to develop attacks.

There are some limitations to this study as there are some international Performance Buzz scores included within the data. We may also begin to see some different relationships forming if we were to take more than just the Top 20 teams out of the 98 teams within the 5 Performance Buzz eligible leagues.

I hope this analysis was able to benefit you in some way, or think about some elements in a different perspective. If you have further questions about this piece of work then don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

I can be found on Twitter: @FI_KBrown

Thanks for taking the time to read this.