What makes good teams good?

Right now, there seem to be two, major tectonic plates grinding past each other in the football analytics world. One, which relies on metrics like expected goals and their various offshoots, is largely based on ‘event’ data such as shots, passes, dribbles etc.; the other, mostly confined to academics and specialists, holds the promise of analyzing player tracking data to give a far more accurate, if complex, picture of where talented players end and talented teams begin.

But what if both approaches are still leaving money on the table when it comes to understanding what makes good teams good (and bad teams bad)?

I’m not as avid a football watcher as I once was, but more and more, especially as I sit through more Championship games, I’ve come to appreciate that the difference between ‘good’ teams and ‘bad’ teams is indeed one of clubs being able to afford good players vs not being able to afford good players.

Stop the presses!

While it may seem obvious, if you believe this, you also have to accept that a team is really only as good as its individual players. If that’s true, we need to know what good players do that bad players don’t.

Part of football mythology holds that what separates the gods from the mortals in soccer is decision-making, sight beyond sight, a knack for premonition, an ability to read the game. This is a romantic idea to talk about, but I’m not sure how decisive it is in ranking a player in terms of pure skill.

Yes, the world’s best midfielders often come with highlight reels that show unbelievable, defense-splitting passes. But the more I watch football, the less I’m convinced it’s the choice of pass itself that marks an elite player, but the much more granular, and more boring, ability to more or less accurately weight that pass each and every time. Most footballers, in other words, would choose the most audacious, jaw-dropping passes — IF they believed they could complete them with something approaching regularity.

It’s not just passes either, but taking touches that manage to keep the ball in play, or making crosses that arc enough to reach the head of an attacking player as quickly as possible, without getting intercepted by a goalkeeper’s outstretched hands.

In other words, what separates the great players from the merely good is better technical ability, controlling the ball more accurately and to get the ball where you want it to go with more consistency, even as the action itself becomes more difficult.

To give you a better sense of what I mean, consider the routine action of ‘switching the play’ on an attack. A player, maybe a fullback, or a winger, will be in possession toward the right flank facing a 2 v 3 situation. They may see a teammate in a better, more open position on the opposite flank. So here, the task would be to make a pass that swiftly and accurately crosses the width of the pitch.

The payoff of this action is that if the pass reaches the intended target, it will have caught out the defense while they’re essentially lopsided, and perhaps lead to a goal as the defenders work to reorganize.

The risk comes in the difficulty of the pass itself. Raking passes across the width of the pitch might go into touch, or they may end up at the feet of an opposing player. However, they may also reach their intended target, but not exactly where the passer wanted, behind the receiver for example. Or they may reach their intended target, but take a fraction of a second longer than if the pass had been weighted slightly differently, giving the opposing defence just a little more time to adjust to the switch.

Nailing this kind of pass with something approaching regularity is the kind of elite technical skill that makes an okay team a little better. Knowing how to weight passes for maximum accuracy. Better ball control. Taking better and fewer touches. Being able to dribble past players more efficiently. The little things that add up to very, very good things. You add those skills up across eleven players and you have a top six club.

You can glean some of these elite technical skills from event data, but event data alone wouldn’t be the best way to measure it, because it might show a pass as ‘complete’ because it reached its target, even though it didn’t reach it in the most effective way (maybe half a yard ahead, at pace, for example).

But on the other hand, this kind of data is not so complicated that you would need a supercomputer to parse reams of tracking data to understand it. Because here, what matters isn’t where and how the team as a whole has ended up on the pitch, but whether in any given moment a particular player is able with consistency to put the ball where they intend to.

“But wait,” someone says. “You’ve said in the past that finishing is often down to random variation and that it’s the ability to get in good shooting positions that matter. Why wouldn’t passing be a matter of random variation, too?”

I would answer that, compared to meaningful shots on goal, passes, crosses and dribbles are a very frequent event. And unlike goals, which have to find their way into a comparatively large target but with LOTS of people working to prevent them, passes require players to put the ball where they want with more precision but under significantly less opposition pressure (in most cases). So you have a greater sample size and less pressure to follow through.

Are these kinds of distinguishing skills repeatable? I don’t know, I haven’t collected data or done any experiments, and most importantly, I’m not a data scientist. But I’m writing this because I think this is a worthy avenue of exploration.

I strongly suspect that

• these margins of technical excellence in rudimentary football skills separate elite players from replacement level players
• these margins aren’t ambiguous or hard to see but plain as day when you know what you’re looking for, and
• you can recruit on the basis of these margins, and even train to improve them in the players you have, IF you know which are the most meaningful (I suspect consistently accurate passes/crosses are among them).

It’s a hunch, but I really do think that what you see is what you get in this sport, you just have to know what you’re looking for.