Lastly I also looked at the more defensive stats. The first graph is successfully winning the ball in four different ways - interceptions, tackles won, dribblers tackled (which seems to be counted separately than other tackles) and successful pressing.
Here you can see Ndidi, Kante and Fred as expected in the top 3, but then Jorginho perhaps surprisingly in 4th ahead of Allan.
Other than Fred, our other three midfielders are right down near the bottom. McTominay is 20th, Pogba 21st and Matic 23rd out of the 26 players I checked. Liverpool, City and Chelsea all don’t have a single midfielder who wins the ball back as little as any of our three. I think most people expect Matic and Pogba to be near the bottom but it’s surprising that McTominay is that low. Considering he’s supposed to be one half of our hard-working defensively solid midfield pairing, he’s not actually doing as much defending as expected.
It does appear that most teams have one midfielder that wins it back a fair bit more than his partner. Kante or Jorginho with Kovacic, Ndidi with Tielemans, Hojbjerg with Sissoko, Allan with Doucoure, and to a lesser extent Rice with Soucek. I guess that’s the balance we have when Fred’s in there, but we probably rotate more than any of them so when he’s not playing we do appear to miss that ball winner. Liverpool (who have the highest average), City and Wolves spread it out a bit more.
On a related note here’s successful and unsuccessful pressing as a total, as even ‘unsuccessful’ pressing probably forces the opponent to pass it backwards or sideways half of the time so it’s still impacting the game.
Allan comfortably out in front with the amount of attempts, Fred comfortably in second, while Jorginho and Ndidi have slightly more successful attempts than the top two due to a better success rate. After that there seems to be two groups of players. One, led by Henderson, Phillips and Kante, that still does a lot of pressing but not quite to the level of the top few, and another group that are a fair bit behind. Our three of McTominay (18th), Matic (23rd) and Pogba (24th) are right down the bottom of the second group.
I also checked the success rate for different types of tackles, largely because I wanted to see if Fred and Pogba were as low with their attempts as I think many expected (Fred because he attempts so many and goes in too hard, Pogba because of defensive laziness).
Fred is on the low end of things, but not by as much as expected. Most players seem to have a press success of 30-34%, so Fred at 29.8% is only just behind. Allan (the only player to attempt more than him) has a lower rate with only 28.8%. General tackles and tacking dribblers are similar - probably on the lower side but not particularly low (ahead of both Matic and McTominay at both). Interestingly Pogba has the highest success percentages for all three categories for our team.
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Overall
Going purely by the stats, the three stand outs seem to be Thiago, Jorginho and Fred for a decent spread of creativity, control and defensive work. Which could be used to argue that these stats mean jackshit, as Thiago is struggling to fit into Liverpool, Jorginho was arguably behind Kante and Kovacic in the pecking order under Lampard (although he’s been a starter so far for Tuchel), and some of our own fans firmly dislike Fred. On the other hand it does agree with my ‘eye test’ that Thiago is actually doing quite well on the individual level for 80% of the time but he just doesn’t suit how Liverpool are currently playing (and the other 20% is him making mistakes and being brushed aside), Jorginho is a good player if they set things up properly which they may be starting to do, and while Fred isn’t perfect he is important as our best all-rounder.
From outside the ‘big four’ of Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool (the teams that are financially strong enough to refuse any realistic bid), the Wolves duo of Moutinho and Neves seem to be the best all-rounders. I’m always surprised that Moutinho never played for any of the top clubs, he feels too good of a midfielder to have spent his career in Portugal, France and now Wolves for the last few years of his career. If we could get him for cheap I’d still be tempted to sign him even though he’s 34. I’m actually a bit surprised Neves is up there as I thought he was struggling a bit this season and had never really played to his potential (maybe harsh considering he’s still only 23).
Other decent all-rounders seem to be Partey, Hojbjerg and perhaps Phillips.
Tielemans and Ndidi have an interesting yin and yang dynamic, with Ndidi being arguably the best defensively while the worst creatively of all the midfielders, and Tielemans next to him pulling up good creative stats but one of the lowest defensively. Of course his ‘poor’ defending stats are still similar to McTominay, Pogba and Matic for us. If he got a move to one of the top teams would his creativity decrease without Ndidi covering his back, or would it increase with better players in front of him? Although Leicester would argue they are one of the top teams now...
On the negative side of things, McTominay is surprisingly low on most of these stats. I knew he was on the lower side compared to our own midfielders but hadn’t really compared him to players from the other clubs before. I’m hoping that now that he seems to be getting back into good form (after 1-2 months of poor to average form) we’ll see some of these stats improve. Of course stats don’t win games, so if he does enough to help the team put the results on the board that’s the main thing. Some of the stats do agree with the eye test that he could improve how much he gets on the ball and then what he does with it though.
Lastly, what the hell is Soucek supposed to be good at? He scores a decent amount of goals and is good in the air, but otherwise he’s a stand out for all the wrong reasons in these stats. In the first category of actions leading to a shot he’s 2nd worst only to Ndidi, he has significantly the lowest distance passed (both in general and forward) and ball carries forward, he attempts the least amount of passes and has by far the worst pass success rate of them all, and his total defensive wins is the third worst. I haven’t actually taken any note of him the few times I’ve watched West Ham play, is he actually as bad as what these stats make him look? It seems to be working for them with their excellent season so far, but damn.
Ok, now that I’ve done this wall of text, I expect everyone to ignore this thread and it will die with no responses at all.
There's no real rhyme or reason to most of it, just stuff that I looked up as I wondered what it would look like.