Tag: La Liga

  • Ball possession in European football (part 1)

    This is part one of a trilogy of posts dedicated to the role of ball possession in football. In this post, we look at how ball possession is calculated and how the focus on ball possession is often (not always) a synonym of success. We also start digging into the bidirectional causation problem: do the teams play…

  • Crossing: An effective strategy?

    Crossing is still very much used by the top European teams (18.6 per match, on average). However, we doubt the efficiency of such an attacking strategy. We calculate that only 1 every 64 crosses is directly translated into a goal. Is it worth trying? We conclude it is not, unless you have someone like Mauro…

  • Top forwards were born in 1993

    In our database, we notice, many of the best forwards have something in common: they were born in 1993. Kane, Dybala, Icardi, Lukaku, Fekir, Belotti and Batshuayi, inter alia. We compare their current stats and the speed of their improvement over the last four years. Their goal conversion rate is growing exponentially. Where will they…

  • 2018 Topscorer preview: Spanish La Liga

    Messi and C. Ronaldo likely to extend their dominion (1.04 goals per game) Suarez seems the only real contender and Dembélé could support him Griezmann and Benzema likely one step behind Three potential surprises: Andone, G. Moreno and Borja Baston Messi or Cristiano this year? Among the top five European leagues, the topscorer table of…

  • Barça: After Neymar, Dembélé or Coutinho?

    Neymar’s ability to dribble and serve key passes is unmatched In the short-term Coutinho seems the most plausible replacement for O’Ney… …but with a long-term view, we would go for Dembélé: a mini-Neymar!    Neymar: Very difficult to replace It is not easy to put together, in a single football player, all the qualities of…

  • Welcome to football analytics

    Welcome to Soccerment’s research blog! We aim at providing our readers with new angles to look at the beautiful game, through football analytics. Digging into the vast amount of public data (gathered from various sources), we try to uncover interesting facts about the performance of football players and teams and display them through compelling analyses and intuitive…