With the Premier League closing in on the halfway pointr, we have seen a huge influence from a number of midfield players. One in which there was a lot of hype early in the season was Eden Hazard in midfield for Chelsea, and the player’s unbelievable ability to make passes in the centre of the field to assist his team mates (not to mention the ability to score himself!). I guess we have Spain to thank for the emphasis placed on the passing game in football with their incredible success in world football and recognizable style of play. So I decided to take the time to look at Premier League midfielders from 2011-12 and see which team had the best midfield passers and whether this made them a more successful team.
To kick this off then, I looked at which players had the best and worse pass success average. The data as a whole concentrated on midfielders and their total pass and middle third pass success.
The graphs are relatively simple to understand but there were some conditions placed on the players involved. Firstly, each player had to of played in 10 games over the season to be included, and the total passes were added up and divided by the amount of games they played to get the average.
Unsurprisingly, we see some big names in the top 10. Arteta, Carrick and Y. Toure all averaged above 60 successful passes per game and, considering all three players are in the top 3 teams of the 2011-12 season, I would find it plausible that some of the teams’ success is the presence of key players in midfield that control the play with accurate passing. What I do find interesting though is that 3 Man Utd players made the top 10 whereas Man City had only the one player, considering Man City eventually triumphed as Champions. This could suggest that whilst having exceptional passers in midfield is important, it may be that success is determined by the players around that make the space and finish off the plays that the key midfielders initiate.
Flipping this around, when we look at the 10 worst passers of the 2011-12 season, it probably wouldn’t surprise you to see four of the players were part of a team that got relegated. In addition, to this we can see players from QPR, West Brom and Wigan, all of whom struggled last season, in the worst 10. To me, this seems to reinforce the point made earlier that teams need a quality passer in midfield to control the game and determine success. I understand that the likes of Wolves, QPR, Bolton etc. will have had other players in their squad that would perform better than those shown but, in comparison to the 3 Man Utd players in the top 10, the quality in depth when looking at the midfield could well have been the downfall for some.
The finale to this particular area focusses on the best 20 passers in the middle third of the pitch. I thought it interesting to look at this area simply because, in the 90 minutes as a whole, most of that time is spent in the middle of the pitch. Therefore, I thought if a team can control possession in this area of the pitch then surely they can convert that to success.
To explain this first and foremost, the black line is the amount of successful middle third passes made on average per game. The orange bars represent the success percentage of middle third passes attempted on average per game. So, in looking at the results the most obvious outcome is that Yaya Toure had the best average of middle third pass successes with 41 per game, closely followed by Carrick, Arteta and Swansea’s Leon Britton. Again, most probably coincidence but the top 3 in this graph follow the final standings of last seasons’ top 3, further enhancing my theory that these midfielders are at the root of team success. On the other hand, when looking at percentage success, the best two performers were Scholes and Essien. This statistic is significant for the players’ respective teams considering they can rely on those players to keep possession in midfield. However, both players have a relatively low average of passes made per game which could suggest that their percentage success is due to less passes being attempted than say Toure or Carrick. Therefore, if a team can find a player who can get a 95+ % success rate when attempting a lot of passes per match then they could well be on the way to a very successful season (much like Chelsea in finding Eden Hazard!!).
In summary then, I think that what this data has shown is that the midfield role within any team is crucial for that team to succeed, and to find even one such player that can control the game in this area can drastically benefit the players around him and the team’s success as a whole. As always, go to the MCFC Analytics site and feel free to download the data. The more people we can get delving into the data available the better!!
