As we all know, Messi is a vital part of the Argentine national team. His talent allows him to unlock complicated situations and matches. We always ask ourselves "how does he do it?"; consistently making the right decision, choosing the best pass. Over his last 9 games prior to the World Cup, we analysed Messi's movement and style of play, and this is what we have learned.
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Pass sonars, radials, wagon wheels,… These are just some of the names you may have heard to describe a method of visualising the direction of a player’s passes. But to understand why they have taken the football industry by storm, we need to dive into the history behind this elucidatory tool. The first recorded use of a wagon wheel was used for live cricket broadcasts, as a tool to show the viewers in which direction they hit every scoring shot during an innings.
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Football is a game defined by goals. Since the Ballon d'Or was created in 1956, only one goalkeeper has won the award, and only a handful of defenders have (none since Fabio Cannavaro in 2006). Clearly, strikers are the ones who capture the public's imagination: it is much easier to appreciate a powerful long shot than a collective step-up by a defense to create an offside trap, for instance. But are shots so black and white? Is it as easy as it seems to determine the difference between a 'good' shot and a 'bad' shot? Increasingly, football analysis has evolved in an attempt to quantify the most important part of the game: goalscoring.
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From promotion from the Championship, to bursting onto the Premier League, to the more sobering realities of a second season in the topflight, Leeds United have been through a lot since partnering with Footovision in 2019, but our relationship is only getting started.
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Football is all about exploiting space: being in the right place at the right time is paramount. A player blessed with technique, acceleration or speed will be ineffective if they cannot read the space around them or understand positioning. These qualities are the difference between good, talented players and consistent world-class players.
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How can we know what a team's principal source of threat in attack is? Is it from quick counterattacks, patient build up play in and around the box, or overloading players on a flank and playing long balls in behind? These questions can be answered by somemetrics which Footovision created in the past, like theevent pitch selector, which allows you to select the startingand finishingareas of events(such as seeing where a player started their dribble and where they were dispossessed), butthese do not provide comprehensive answers for when multiple events(like shots, passes and dribbles all happening in the same attack)require tracking.Oursolution is the Playing Areas Summarywidget.
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The Expected Goals metric measures the quality of a shot based on several variables. The nature of the assist, shot angle and distance from the goal, and whether it was a header, volley, or first-time finish all determine whether a shot is deemed a 'big chance'. By adding up a player or team's expected goals, it gives us an indication of how many goals a player or team should score on average, compared to how many goals they actually scored. In football, many more shots and chances are created than goals scored.
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Artificial intelligence has greatly impacted the 21st Century; it's plain to see that every aspect of modern life is influenced by technology. From our smartphones and laptops to going shopping and being able to park our car automatically: Computer Vision and AI is around us everywhere. In the late 90’s and the dawn of computer science, no one could have guessed that by 2021 we would be living in a world where most functions are carried out by machines and computers in a high-tech, competitive landscape. The same precision and efficacy that these machines create for our daily life can be translated to performance analytics in the sports industry.
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