How Do Spurs Play?

Virtually Scouting a Football Team

In a previous post, I showed my ignorance of how Spurs play by mentioning that I expected Dele Alli to be represented in the most frequent passing sequences for Spurs. Looking at the season stats, Dele Alli shows up in the top 10 players with most assists, right behind players like Mahrez and Ozil — who all appear in their respective teams’ sequences.

Spurs was, of the 5 best-placed teams, the only one whose sequences were predominantly located in its own defense:

The three most frequent passing sequences for Spurs

Granted, I don’t think I saw a complete Spurs match last season, so mistakes like that are expected. But can I learn how Spurs play just by looking at stats?

That looks like a cool challenge.

We already know the most common passing sequences for Spurs. What we don’t know is the patterns it uses to attack. So we looked at the passes that directly lead to shots and goals, using Manchester City and Arsenal as benchmarks (the teams that finished directly below and above them).

Categorizing plays

Using a simple clustering technique, we took all passes and crosses made within 10 seconds of a shot — let’s call those “a play ”— and classified all plays as one of four types:

The 4 basic styles of play. If you’re the type that likes to know how sausages are made, you can learn more about the process here

Below is the style breakdown for each team:

City seems to favor Set Pieces while Arsenal favors Center Plays, but both teams are pretty similar in their style.

Spurs, however, has a distinct characteristic: their Direct Plays are much more common than in other teams. That is consistent with what we found in the most common passing sequences —attacking plays start deeper in the field, so most passes are made between the defenders.

Player Presence

To find out who the most important players are, we calculated each player’s presence in each type of play. The top 5 for each type of play is as follows:

Some takeaways:

• Christian Eriksen is the most common player in every type of Open Plays (Wing, Direct, and Center)
• Erik Lamela and Christian Eriksen are the main Set Piece takers
• Harry Kane, besides being the main goalscorer, is also heavily involved in team plays
• Toby Alderweireld, a Central Defender, is the second most common player in Direct Plays
• Fullbacks Danny Rose and Kyle Walker are heavily involved in Wing Plays, with Kyle Walker also heavily involved in Direct Plays
• Delle Alli, Lamela and Eric Dier are present throughout the different styles of Open Plays (with Dier and Lamela Direct Play, and Delle Alli in the Wing Play, and all three in Center Plays)

Direct To The Goal

The most interesting characteristic of Tottenham’s style, when compared to other top ranked team, s is the abundance of Direct Plays.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper on those plays. Using the same clustering technique we applied previously, we classified each pass as one of six types:

The Key Passes are types A, B, E and F. Let’s see who is making them:

• A&E :Long Balls. Toby Alderweireld is the key man, with 25 long passes resulting in a shot. This is one of the most overlook actions by football statistics: not the last pass, but the pass that moves a team forward and results in a chance, even two or the passes later.
• B: Attacking forward pass. As expected, the attacking midfielders rule this category, with Lamela, Eriksen and Dele Alli as the top 3, closely followed by Harry Kane.
• F: Crosses. Fullbacks appear more frequently than Wingers delivering crosses in Spurs’ Direct Plays, a common facet of modern football. In this respect, left-back Danny Rose is an underperformer, with only 3 passes in 2.132 minutes played (versus 7 passes in 1.288 minutes played for substitute Ben Davies and 13 passes in 2.943 minutes played for right-back Kyle Walker).

Play Sequencing

Using the above letter coding for individual passes, we can define common patterns for whole plays.

We will build on this in future posts, but for now, here are the most common sequences in Spurs’ Direct Plays:

CB    11
EF     9
A      6
AB     5
DB     5
C      5

It’s interesting how EF go together exclusively: a diagonal long pass followed by an attacking sideways pass (or cross). This proves that passes should not be analyzed individually — one pass clearly sets up the next pass.

The weirdest sequence? Easily FDDCBDB.