He’s literally impossible Posted at: 11:30 on Thursday, October 23, 2014 Category: Analysis, Exclusive / Special, Statistics Written by: EnriqueSDS He’s literally impossible On the 1st of July Nate Silver’s ESPN statistics and analytics blog FiveThirtyEight published the “Lionel Messi is Impossible” piece. Over social media recently I stated that it’s not the numbers that prove Messi is the best player in the world. What does then? To shorten what is complicated and longwinded reasoning, it comes down to a simple statement: you can just see it. Then a follower reminded me of the aforementioned FiveThirtyEight piece, though he ironically implied that Messi isn’t about stats and figures when the entire premise of the article he cited is stats and figures. Which is precisely the beauty of “Lionel Messi is Impossible”. Even though his genius is exponentially more than the box score, measurables are handy because there are no “yeah, but”s. These are hard, inarguable analytical facts which as I will go through to fortify Messi’s unmatchable grandeur. Now quoting the author Benjamin Morris: “By now I’ve studied nearly every aspect of Messi’s game, down to a touch-by-touch level: his shooting and scoring production; where he shoots from; how often he sets up his own shots; what kind of kicks he uses to make those shots; his ability to take on defenders; how accurate his passes are; the kind of passes he makes; how often he creates scoring chances; how often those chances lead to goals; even how his defensive play marking compares to other high-volume shooters. And that’s just the stuff that made it into this article. I arrived at a conclusion that I wasn’t really expecting or prepared for: Lionel Messi is impossible.” What I particularly loved about this piece was its scope. Morris crunches a ton of numbers to gives us a perfectly fair representative sample that analyses the gauntlet of football. It’s also a handy source to squash any annoying Ronaldo versus Messi debate. So let’s get into it. Scoring and Shooting It is a proven statistical fact in sport that nothing is rarer than the goal. Of all team sports, no scoring play happens less frequently. That’s why strikers have historically and continued to be (though with a growing emphasis on the play-maker) the position most riches are lavished on. Therefore, what better starting point than “scoring production“, a measurable that combines both goals and assists. scoring production What’s immediately clear is both Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are outliers, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Their production is truly at a level of efficacy and consistency never seen before. This is the least revealing aspect of the article, so stick with me, but still it shows that in the measured time period Messi scored and assisted (slightly) more than Ronaldo, and most notably did so in less games. It should be evident to those that watch both players regularly that Ronaldo’s shot volume is enormously larger than Messi. That Messi is a more effective scorer should always have entered into anyones’ defense in a Messi versus Ronaldo discussion and now there’s inarguable evidence to prove it. shooting efficiency Here Messi begins to prove his impossibility, or more accurately his statistical impossibility, because what Morris is arguing is that Lionel Messi is statistically impossible. Plotting 866 professional footballer who played in at least 50 games since 2010 and attempted at least 1 shot per game, Messi ranks as the 9th most efficient shooter in football. Importantly though he is by far the most efficient of any player who takes more than about 2.5 shots per game. Meaning that Messi is scoring more often despite taking more shots, which is against statistical law which would expect a decelerating relationship between attempts and efficiency (law of diminishing returns). In other words, usually those that take many attempts tend to be more inefficient, but Messi isn’t. Despite taking about at least one shot per game more than 862 other players footballers, he’s the 9th most efficient scorer. Cristiano Ronaldo ranks 173rd. Now we get into some higher level analytics those familiar with American sports will be more comfortable with. ESPN estimates “expected goals” as the chance of a player scoring based upon shot type and player location, the two most important determinants of chance quality. Once one has expected goals, you can calculate a measurable called “goals above average” (GAA), being expected goals minus actual goals. What’s nice about this figure is its equalizing nature. A player’s expected goals are a function of their style of play, which takes away bias, meaning GAA is a fair picture of who and by how much a player is over-performing above statistical expectation. At this point you won’t be surprised to learn that Messi has the highest GAA of the top 20 shooters in football. And largely, it’s not even close. Messi scores a 0.038 GAA, more than twice some very familiar names: Karim Benzema (0.016), Ronaldo (0.015), Edinson Cavani (0.014) and Robin van Persie (0.013). Perhaps this article factored into Real Madrid’s reasoning for splashing a record fee on Gareth Bale, as the Welshman registered an impressive GAA of 0.037, just shy of Messi’s figure. Readers can go to the article to compare the rest, but other notables are Arjen Robben’s 0.023 and Sergio Agüero’s 0.021, whereas flashy names like Mario Balotelli and Robert Lewandoski scored negative GAAs. Don’t you hear this one a lot, “Yeah, but Ronaldo scores from distance, Messi isn’t a threat from outside the box”. Wrong. Obviously the closer to goal the higher one’s likelihood of scoring is. Of all the shots taken that were scored (goal percentage) by the players analyzed, on average 38.2% of shots from inside the goal box are scored, 13.1% from inside the penalty area and a measly 3.1% from outside the box. [Not adding up to 100%? This exercise is not including set-pieces] So straight off the bat it’s obvious that scoring from outside the box is by nature a difficult and rare skill. Well, for most players it is. Messi’s statistics here are truly mind-boggling. Above it was proved that Messi takes the best quality shots (his average goals expected is the highest of the top 20 in the game) and is most efficient with them. Here the numbers prove that Messi is additionally the most productive. Messi scores 47.8% (versus the average of 38.2%) of shots he attempts inside the goal box, 21.9% (vs 13.1%) from inside the area and most remarkably he scored 12.1% of the shots he takes from distance. That’s not far from four times better than the average elite level professional! As Morris points out, Messi is nearly as productive from outside the area (12.1%) than most are from inside it (13.1%). That’s what being impossible is about. Compared to Ronaldo? The Real Madrid man is amazing himself, but still hard cold facts rank him below Messi. (Messi – Ronaldo) 47.8% – 46.2%, 21.9% – 18.5%, 12.1% – 4.1%. Yes, Messi scores three times more often from outside the box than Ronaldo. goals from outside area vs attempts The title says it all. This graph shows data on 8, 335 players who took at least 1 shot from outside the box since the 2010 World Cup. Incredibly, only 1, 835 even scored! Meaning just 22% of unique footballers who even attempted to shoot from distance actually made it. This graph’s conclusion is crystal clear. With less than half the number of attempts (173) of Ronaldo (over 400), Messi scored more goals than the Real Madrid man from distance. Morris then rattles off a metric he calculated: Messi is scoring 12.6 goals above expectation from outside the box. The next highest is 7.5 above expectation, and Ronaldo is at 5.5. “Yeah, but Messi has Xavi, Iniesta and company serving him goals on a plate, Ronaldo would score as many if he was at Barça”. Wrong again. unassisted shooting Basically of all the footballers in the world, only Messi and Carlos Tevez are better at scoring when doing it on their own. He scores nearly 23% of the shots he creates for himself and almost as impressively scores about 21% of the chances others present him. Ronaldo looks like he comes in at scoring about 9% of the shots he manufactures for himself and effectively the same percentage as Leo when assisted. And in the words of Morris, this is why Messi is impossible, “Somehow, Messi has done even better when taking it on his own than when somebody sets him up. Moreover, on unassisted shots he shoots nearly 10 percent and .044 GAA better than the next best player (Sergio Agüero for Manchester City) does, despite taking the fourth-most such shots of the 28 players in the group.” “Ok, all that may be true, but Ronaldo is a beast at free-kicks. He’s the best there for sure.” Sorry, that’s wrong too, but at least it’s close this time. “On direct free kicks, Messi has scored about 8 percent of the time (compared to all players’ 5 percent), with .021 GAA per shot (Ronaldo has scored on 7 percent with an identical .021 GAA).” Dribbling taking on defenders Once again, Messi is impossible. He attempts more take-ons per game than any player in the game and has the highest success rate. That is not normal. As mentioned already, usually efficiency decreases with attempts, as we can see with Luis Suárez, who is an extremely aggressive dribbler but not nearly as successful. Look at all the other players who take on players more than 4 times per game, all but two of them don’t get over a 40% success rate, including Ronaldo. Messi attempts dribbling past opponents twice as often (over 8 times) and is still above 10% more successful. Passing “From the above, you might think Messi is a selfish player. Or you might assume that if Messi is so good at shooting, he’d focus on it to the exclusion of other skills. But, in true Wayne Gretzky-eque fashion, Messi is also one of the top assisters in our data set. Once again, that makes him a crazy outlier: No one else (aside from, yes, Ronaldo) even comes close to his combination of goals scored versus goals dished.” assists vs goals Messi again shows to be impossible. He is simultaneously the best goal/game man and among the best assist/game players, only below Mesut Özil and Franck Ribéry in assists. Now we venture into the specifics around passing. When Morris plotted a graph of how effective player’s are at “long passing”, meaning their pass led to a “successful play”, nobody was as accurate at long-range passing than Messi who passed a similar volume. In this category, Ronaldo completed 60% of his 35 attempts at long passing, whereas Messi’s number was 54% though he attempted more than double the passes (81). This figure ties in nice to one Morris gives before that shows of all the “forwards” in football, Messi completes more than double the amount of forward passes than any other striker. These figures portray the type of player Messi is, one who despite producing statically impossible levels of goals and assists, also is intimately involved in the overall game play itself. But here are the two graphs regarding passing that struck me most. through ball aggression in final 3rd Against players in his category, forwards, Messi smokes the competition regarding through-balls, aka the most important, gorgeous, skillful passing action. Not only is he light-years ahead in attempts, he’s as significantly superior in actual number of completed assists. Compare that to Ronaldo’s shooting efficiency stat, where his huge volume of attempts translated to a lower than average efficiency, which follows expected statistical rules. The second graph encapsulates attacking aggression and initiative. Once in the final third, Messi not only advances the ball forward more than anyone (and much more than the average cluster), he simultaneously manages the most goals per game. Those passes he advances are the most likely to be assists, hence that translating to his superb showing in that category. It doesn’t get much closer to perfection to have someone that combines scoring and assisting at both higher volume and greater efficiency than anyone else. Messindependencia This brings as back to a familiar “yea, but” when people incredibly try to discredit Messi using the excellence of his teammates. What Morris’ statistical analysis shows actually is that Barça rely more on Messi than the other way around, something the Barça nation know as Messindependencia. The two graphs below show that of all the top players, Messi adds more value to his team than any other individual player to theirs. When Messi is involved (either as creator or finisher), Barça’s likelihood of scoring from a shot jumps 9.6%, a whole 9% more than Ronaldo. The next graph brings us back to goals above average (GAA) and combines it with value added. It compares shots taken by a team that do not involve the player compared to his personal GAA. Basically it adds the GAA of the player with the GAA of the rest of his team. Notice in this graph the trend all the other player dots create. The higher the percentage of team shots involving any given player, the trend is that their value added moves towards zero. That makes sense because as a player takes on a higher percentage of his team’s total shots in a game, it decreases the probability that one of the other nine players could score. But once again, Messi’s dot is in a place a statistician usually associates with anomalies. Despite monopolizing team shots, Messi’s value added soars above all others. Or as Morris puts it, “Finally, after however many charts, we see a diminishing return. At least for everyone not named Lionel Messi. He once again tops the field, impervious to the burden.” value added shot or assist Value added to total offense participation Conclusion Compared to his closest peers, even the other tiny number of truly elite footballers, he not only always significantly outperforms the pack, his existence on the field defies statistical norms. Having just celebrated his decade with the senior squad, this was an opportune moment to show using concrete, inarguable facts that Lionel Messi is more than the best, he’s literally (well statistically speaking) impossible. “It’s not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It’s not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It’s not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It’s not possible to lead the world’s forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it’s certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins. But Messi does all of this and more.” Image: Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images Europe EnriqueSDS is a senior writer, translator and editor for totalBarça, hit me up on Twitter @enriqueschoch or (less so) Google+ Read more: totalbarca/2014/statistics/hes-literally-impossible/#ixzz3Hci8gRyz
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 10:54:29 +0000
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