Throughout his career, Messi has been criticized for walking. But theres still heavy lifting to do: We have to show that he actually makes his team better. The highpoint of 8.6 per 90 in 2007-08 was not matched but in each of these four seasons, Messi was completing over six dribbles per 90 with 7.5 per 90 in both 2009-10 and 2010-11. Passes the ball to a player who takes a shot. But how does he do it? Above all else, they try to maintain possession of the ball until a chance opens up. Messi milestone tracker: PSG star nears 800 career goals, plus ALL his records, Alaba racially abused over Messi FIFA Best vote, Messi beats Mbappe to Best FIFA Men's award, Arsenal grind out win, Bayern back on track, Messi milestone: Weekend Review, Xavi reacts to chance of Barca return for Messi, Messi's last-gasp free kick seals 4-3 win for PSG, Messi unlikely to make Barca return, father says. Even Ronaldo's great rival Lionel Messi, who is often highlighted for his lack of defensive work and for walking around the pitch, is averaging 5.3 miles per game. In the 12 years since he became the youngest Argentine to score a World Cup goal, Lionel Messi has won more Ballon dOr trophies, awarded to the worlds best player, than anyone before him.1 He has scored more official goals in a calendar year than anyone in living memory. We can also see whether they do that actively, by running into open spaces, or passively, by staying in high-value locations while the play shifts away.. Benjamin Morris is a former sportswriter for FiveThirtyEight. Messi makes him look foolish, as he does most defenders in the game. ), and some of it comes from putting in those shots more often. Season Position Situation Shot zones Shot types. He once again tops the field, impervious to the burden. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle when it comes to data in football, but there is still plenty of scope to maximise its utility. Red Zone Scores per Game (TDs only) Red Zone Scoring Percentage (TD only) Extra Point Attempts per Game. In terms of average per year, Messi gets paid $168,479,776. The people to whom hes dished assists and chances have scored on 18.1 percent of their shots. How should Argentina fans feel about all this, given the disappointment theyve experienced in World Cups past and the hopes theyve pinned on Messi this year? 137 touches. Now, if Messi scores with his hand or does another maze run versus England in a future World Cup, well all roll over in disbelief. There is no right or wrong number of touches that a forward should have, but having a standardised measure across all players highlights their tendency to perform a certain action when given an equal opportunity to do so. When adjusted for opportunity to score, the gap between the players output might not be as big as first thought. For example, focusing solely on the Premier League, we can look at players share of team passes into the penalty area when they are on the field. I should note that the data on this has a little gray area. All players have scored on 11 percent of their strong kick shots and have an average .051 GAA per shot. At least for everyone not named Lionel Messi. But put one check-mark in Ronaldos column, as he has scored on 93 percent of his penalty attempts. I didnt count missed tackles as either positive or negative, because they arent nearly as bad as a successful tackle is good. To answer that, youd probably have to ask the man himself.. Ronaldo 0.40 Goals Per Game. The Timbers have struggled this season to play the ball from wide positions as they have the second-lowest completion percentage (17.1 percent) on open-play crosses this season. And then in a snap, the ball is on his thigh and back at his feet nearly immediately. The contrast between Spain in 2010 and Spain in 2014 seems huge: The 2010 team won the World Cup, and the 2014 team was tied for first in the tournament to be mathematically eliminated. For this purpose, I created a stat called possessions used. Its a little bit analogous to usage rate in basketball, and incorporates the number of touches in which a player: In other words, its a stat meant to reflect anything that ends a teams possession, whether that outcome is positive or negative. Using data as a filter, is it more impressive for a striker to score 10 goals for a team battling relegation than a striker scoring 25 goals for the inevitable title winners? Barcelona (17). Messi and his Argentina teammate Angel di Maria (also of Real Madrid) are tied to four decimal places, but Messi just edges him in the fifth. False nine Bernardo Silva had 86 touches. The striker doesn't run as much as his fellow 'Killers'. In the match against Manchester United, whod come into the Camp Nou as maybe the best team in the world, playing the best soccer in the world, Messi shined. In a busy summer transfer window, your teams recruitment staff are looking for a clinical striker who is quick to get a shot away and will score something out of nothing. As outlined in The Athletics football analytics glossary, this is a crucial adjustment so that a fair comparison can be made between players for the time they are on the pitch. Touchdowns per Game. Imagine how good Peyton Manning would be if whomever he played for could spend three times as much as 90 percent of NFL teams. The average Infogol Player Rating for Kylian Mbappe-Lottin in the French Ligue 1 2022/23 season is 8.33. . Yes, the 25-year-old Spurs striker only averages 38 touches per match, with him only getting 12 successful touches for every unsuccessful one. There are far more complex metrics, models and algorithms within this space, but at the simplest level of analysis, should this be the new normal in how we interpret football data? Super Bowl . If we want to compare Messi to all players with a remotely similar volume of production, were left with Ronaldo. He shoots slightly below average on (a limited number of) headers (10 percent vs. 13 percent). . The 33-year-old has a lifelong sponsorship deal with Adidas. Whether Messi consciously decides to go against the run of play with his movement is difficult to ascertain. Lionel Messi is a Forward who has appeared in 20 matches this season in Ligue 1, playing a total of 1762 minutes. That goal was quintessential Messi: He got the ball on the right side of the field, held it for a few seconds, broke to the middle and in heavy traffic swerved it in on off his left foot. Thats not to say one approach is better than the other, but note that it means that the observed shooting gap between them is at least somewhat exaggerated. This is a simple example, but lets dig deeper. Why not try to get the touch on the soccer ball that Messi has. This attacking performance currently places him at 15th out of 407 for Ligue 1 Players who've played at least 3 matches. As a young player, if youre going to emulate someones control and touch, youve chosen no better player than Messi. As it turns out, not only does Messi pass the ball forward aggressively, he does so accurately, and the balls he delivers are successful a very high percentage of the time. Looking at Europes prolific pass masters, Marco Verratti, Toni Kroos and Joshua Kimmich are among just six players to average more than 100 touches per game last season. So a useful metric (made possible by play-by-play data) is the percentage of a players passes that lead to successful plays on the other end meaning the receiving player manages to get off a shot, or passes the ball to someone else, and so on. (Thats 1.2 goals per game overall.) Frank Ribery is a terrific winger/midfielder who can sometimes put the ball in the net, but hes the fourth-leading scorer on powerhouse Bayern Munichs Bundesliga-winning squad. CORRECTION (July 1, 1:06 p.m.): This article originally misstated that Cristiano Ronaldo had 289 goals since the 2010 World Cup. The average number of touches for the starting XI that day was 95. Among players who played 100 games with two or more shots per game and one or more chance created per game. Ronaldo 179.1 Minutes Per Goal. Thats the ultimate test, juggle the ball when a defender is sprinting at you in front of 90,000 people at the Camp Nou. Hitchman Conacher Heinrich 0 0.00 0.00 0.00. But Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid which, like Barcelona, doesnt press particularly stringently in its opponents half averaged four-fifths of a mile more than Messi. Finally, Messis defense is consistent with that of a high-volume striker.15 That hes practically munchkin-sized (hes only 1.69 met ahem, excuse me 5 7 tall) seems not to matter. As he battles to cement his reputation this summer, Messi will be under more scrutiny than ever before. But dont sleep on his right foot: When he uses it, he scores 23 percent of the time. There are 47 players with 50 or more attempts from outside the box without a single goal, and about 500 with at least 20 attempts and no goals. 5 of the 12 goals were scored at home while he scored 7 goals at away games. Ronaldo scored .139 goals per attempt, so he had .015 GAA per goal. A goalscorer can't be compared to complete players. Theres a stat for that, and in my view its one of the most revealing, reflecting both Messis skill and style, and the relationship between the two. Lionel Messi's touch on the soccer ball is what makes him the greatest player to ever play the game. AMKFootball has produced a chart to show the players who have the worst touches per 90 minutes. But I bet even Cristiano wishes he had Messis touch on the soccer ball. Messi can shoot it just about any which way. Another Iron Bowl clash between No. He also plays 2.66 key passes each game which leads to significant scoring chances. This puts Messi Cuccittini's npxG output at 9.90 which puts him in the top 99 percentile of Ligue 1 players. Hes not a player who complains or acts like a spoiled child at times, a la Cristiano. Looking into his passing aspect of the game, Messi Cuccittini passes the ball roughly 59.25 times during a game with a pass completion rate of 83.45%. Since the end of the 2010 World Cup, Messi has been responsible for 291 goals and assists in the 201 of his games in club and national team play tracked by the sports analytics company Opta. Garber: MLS would be flexible for Messi move, Messi receives threat in Rosario store attack. "per 90 minutes", "per 100 touches", or "per minute in possession" cannot be underestimated as Dan Altman, creator of smarterscou t, highlights.. Sacramento Republics Maalique Foster panenka penalty kick and then backflip is just amazing. I think its fair to say that goals mean more in soccer than points do in most sports. With the game in stoppage time and the score tied at 0-0, Lionel Messi took the ball near the right corner of the penalty area, held it for a moment, then broke left, found his seam, took his strike and curled it in from 29 yards. Lionel Messi's contract drama ended with the Barcelona star sealing the deal as soccer's second $1 billion earner, but Kylian Mbappe, a 21-year-old Frenchman, is poised to steal the show. Like Ronaldo, he has an enormous number of goals, but also takes an enormous number of shots. Ill discuss those separately. As the primary striker for such a juggernaut, it can be hard to detangle Messis goal-scoring prowess from Barcelonas general offensive dominance. Messi, meanwhile, scores at a remarkable rate. Messi and Ronaldo have been compared to each other so often by sports media and fans alike that it almost feels trite to compare them again, but it cant be helped. And even though Messis version of the Maradona run and Hand of God wasnt on the World Cup stage, they were both dumbfounding and amazing on a number of levels nonetheless. A rudimentary measure would simply be distance to goal, but after discussions with experts at Barcelona, Fernandez and Bornn realized that the value of space in soccer changes dynamically based on the positions of the players and the ball. The impact of these "denominators" e.g. Since assist-related stats tend to be dependent on a teams offensive system, for this chart Ive grouped shots by team, so it only includes Messis shots for Barcelona and Ronaldos for Real Madrid. That World Cup team scored fewer goals per game than this years: only eight goals in seven games in 2010, while this years group-stage dropouts scored four goals in three. It doesnt help if a player passes 60 yards to someone swarmed with defenders. He has scored on 22.1 percent of his regular (non-set, non-penalty, non-shootout) shots for Barca himself. And whats more, his passing profile is nothing like the other Barcelona forwards, who typically send 72 percent of their passes back or square. Given that, its no surprise that Messi excels at the through-ball, the delicate and gorgeous play that requires perfect circumstances and perfect timing to be successful. On direct free kicks (like the one he scored on against Nigeria), Messi has scored about 8 percent of the time (compared to all players 5 percent), with .021 GAA per shot (Ronaldo has scored on 7 percent with an identical .021 GAA). Obviously passing the ball is an important skill (which I covered a bit above), but for this metric I just want to know about the relative likelihood of good outcomes (goals, assists) to bad ones (misses, turnovers, etc.) Scored a goal & set up 3. Despite him only running an average of 8'715 kilometres per game. Inter Milan defeated AC Milan, 1-0 in Italian Serie A derby play. Were used to seeing him provide dazzling passes, incisive shots and glamorous dribbles, but we shouldnt be afraid to keep our eyes on him even when the ball is elsewhere, and especially if he is moving slowly.