Weird Passing Games

I dunno, I have a database

On Sunday, Arsenal and Manchester City played to a 2-2 draw in a match that was not notable in any way and produced minimal discourse among soccer fans.

However, the game did have one unusual statistical characteristic, identified by the data and analytics company Opta in a tweet shortly after the match.

That’s pretty crazy! With 20 years of data, 380 matches per season, and 11 players per team, over 150,000 players had the opportunity to pull off this feat. But it wasn’t until Sunday that it happened — and twice in the same match.

It seemed like such an oddity that I had to investigate it, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past two days.¹

Before getting started, there are a couple of important notes about the data. First, exactly how you’re defining a “pass” matters. Timber did in fact complete one of his three throw-in attempts during the match. But this tweet ignores throw-ins, which I think is reasonable enough. Second, and more consequentially for the post, this statistic was noted immediately after the match. Data companies typically provide a real-time feed which delivers data to clubs and media as the game is ongoing, and a second validated feed which is produced in the hours or days after the match. Presumably, somewhere in the process of producing the validated feed, an error was identified in the real-time feed.² Timber did in fact complete one pass from an inbounds position and he is correctly credited with that pass in the database.

So, does that mean this match was not particularly notable? Or is a player completing no passes and their teammate completing only one still a pretty wild outlier? Also, the post mentioned only the Premier League. Have there been matches in other leagues where a player didn’t complete any passes?

Wait Is That What This Post Is About?

Yes. Yes it is.

I got interested in this odd question and I spent two days wrangling data to answer it. Perhaps this is not the most consequential topic in the world, but what is the point of having a newsletter and a database if I can’t spend a couple days playing around with some weird statistics and come out the other side with a post?

The “No Passing Score”

I took my database of matches, which dates back to the 2010–11 season, and I looked at the “Big Five” leagues across Europe. This means I have about 25,000 matches to consider and over 500,000 opportunities for players to complete a match without completing a pass.

I created a very simple score to rank them.

\(NoPassingScore = MinutesPlayed \times \frac{1}{1 + (0.5 \times PassesCompleted)}\)

So here are all the players who were most unsuccessful at completing passes to their teammates in the Big Five leagues since the 2010–11 season, ranked in descending order by No Passing Score.

A couple things stand out. First is that my minutes calculation includes added time, and this match had a lot of it. Second, Timber’s match with just one pass completed in nearly full time is still among the 30 matches with the lowest recorded No Passing Score. Even with his single completed pass added back in, the match was still an extreme outlier. But I also found some patterns here, some types of pass-light matches, players, and situations, and I think they tell us a few things about what happened in this match.