Players that passed the ball into the box often
The data for all the 64 matches at the just concluded FIFA world cup in Qatar has been made available courtsey of Statsbomb and I want to create beautiful visualisations and inferences from the data. This project idea was inspired by JK on Twitter.
Basically, the main aim of the project is to visualise the the players that passed the ball into the 18 yard box the most during the World cup and that is excluding set-pieces.
From this graph, we can see that it is mainly players that played the maximum number of games in the WC that appear here (ie players from teams that reached the semi-finals). That is with the exception of Raphinha and KdB from Brazil and Belgium.
Looking at the above plot, we can come to a variety of conclusions about how various teams play and how they utilize different players. The conclusions are obviously not to be used in isolation, but it is a great place to start.
Starting with Argentina, they have 3 players (Di Maria, De Paul, Messi). We can see Argentina’s build up play usually tends towards the right handside and usually from the half spaces.
Then for France, they also have 3 players (Mbappe, Dembele and Griezmann). We can see the 3 players have different profiles when it comes to passing the ball into the box. Dembele usually progresses the ball into the box from hugging the right flank, Mbappe is similar to Perisic and Griezmann’s passing is not defined.
For Croatia, there is an obvious use on their wingbacks (Perisic and Juranovic) to progress the ball into the box. The only Morrocan player there, Ziyech is of similar profile to Messi.
The python code I used to generate these plots can be found on my GitHub.
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