Kieran Trippier: Best Passer at the World Cup?
I’m going to be honest, prior to the World Cup, I had never heard of Kieran Trippier. Even as the tournament started, and I watched a lot of England play, my eye was drawn to the play of Harry Kane and and Raheem Sterling up front. Trippier constantly seemed in the mix, progressing the ball into dangerous areas and taking a number of free kicks for England, but he wasn’t setting the world on fire. Based on the model for positional value that I outlined here, his passes in Russia did more to move his team into better scoring position than anyone else in the competition.
In my last post, I laid out a methodology for assigning value (in xG) to different locations on the pitch. Basic soccer knowledge states that the closer you are to the goal, the easier it is to score, and the heat map to the left represents that. The gradient of value is very flat until you approach the area around the 18. It follows, then, that the players who are able to complete passes to teammates in these dangerous areas would be extremely valuable.
The StatsBomb event data that I’m using for this analysis contains the location from which each pass was sent, and the location at which it was received. By attaching the location values to these two points and then calculating the difference, we can calculate the gain in positional xG for each pass. We can determine the top passers from the World Cup by summing up the values for all positive value passes in open play (set pieces deserve a whole different article), which results in the following:
While Trippier at the top of the leaderboard is certainly surprising, the rest of the cohort stands up as some of the top ball-movers in World soccer. With the exception of Germany and Spain, all of the teams represented made deep runs in the tournament, which makes sense, as what we are looking at is cumulative, not a rate stat. The prior two World Cup champions exited early but had some of the highest possession numbers in the entire tournament, giving Kimmich, Isco, and Alba ample opportunity to rack up numerous positive passes, though not enough to see their teams deeper into the tournament.
Much was made of the obsolescence of the possession-heavy styles favored by these teams, especially in the context of the ascendant counter-press. While the story is certainly more complicated than that, it’s probably worth looking at a more rate-based stat in the future to account for the possibly inflated passing numbers of certain sides.
Does this mean that Trippier was really the best passer in Russia? No, likely not. It does, however, open up a conversation into how we should measure passing value and what makes defines effectiveness as a distributor. That a right back could be even in the same conversation as players like De Bruyne and Modrić is noteworthy in itself.
Does anything jump out to you about Trippier’s passing map below?
