How can we measure something as fluid as a football match in charts and numbers?
People have wrestled with that question for as long as we’ve kept records of the sport. As far back as the 1960s, Charles Reep was hand-drawing elaborate colour-coded charts to visualise England’s play. In the last few decades, the number of familiar football stats doubled when FIFA decided to count assists as well as goals, then exploded when new data companies made it possible to assemble a standard menu of shot counts, possession percentages, corner kicks, yellow cards and so on.
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All of that only scratches the surface of what data can tell us about a game, though. In the hope of looking beyond the box score to get a better snapshot of the action, and drawing inspiration from lots of our favourite data analysts and apps, The Athletic has developed a match dashboard that tries to present a detailed picture of a match in an easily digestible format (though, of course, your appetite for this sort of thing may vary).
As with all our data visualisations, you can think of this as a beta version that will evolve with feedback and new ideas — feel free to drop us your thoughts in the comment section.
Here’s how The Athletic’s match dashboard looks:
And here’s what it all means…
Threat timeline
Below the score is a kind of visualisation that’s sometimes called game flow or momentum. It’s a timeline of the match, with minutes on the x-axis and bars on the y-axis showing each team’s goal threat by minute (sort of — we’ll come back to this). When the bars pointing up get longer, the home team was threatening to score, and the same for downward bars for the away team. During a particularly end-to-end passage of play, both teams may threaten around the same time.
Even though this kind of viz has been around for at least a century, there’s no standard for exactly how one should work. The problem is that football is spiky. A simple chart of goal probabilities for a match — measured by something like possession value or expected threat — would show a lot of near-worthless passages of midfield play punctuated by the occasional massive spike when one team breaks into the box or connects on a cross and their chance of scoring shoots up from the single digits to 20 or 50 or even 90 per cent in a matter of seconds, depending on differences of only a few yards.
Our dashboard’s version of the threat timeline shows each team’s chance of scoring (read: maximum ball-location-based possession value or shot-based non-penalty expected goals) in each minute of the game, capped at a 15 per cent chance to score. To represent big chances, while also showing the more general sort of threat that we might call “momentum” or “the run of play”, the chart blends five-minute segments of the match using leading and lagging exponential moving averages, so that a really big chance will look less like a lone skyscraper and more like a pyramid. A couple of dangerous attacks separated by a few minutes will register as a sustained passage of threatening play.
The resulting chart shows something important about the match: how danger ebbs and flows, often swinging from one end to the other following key events such as goals or red cards (indicated here by icons above and below the timeline).
Territory
In addition to time, we can also visualise how a match played out in space. The territory plot in the centre of the dashboard shows where on the pitch one team had more of the ball than the other. It’s a more detailed version of a viz you’ve seen from The Athletic before.
In areas where one team’s colour is darkest, they had a lot more attacking touches (passes, carries, shots and so on) than their opponents, while light areas were more evenly contested. Typically the team that had more overall possession in the match will also spread its colour across a wider territory, but you’ll often see dark hotspots where one team overloaded a particular zone to exert more localised control.
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To the left and right of the territory plot are bars showing possession percentages (each team’s share of all attacking touches) and field tilt (their share of both teams’ touches in the final third). Although these splits will usually look pretty similar, sometimes a match with even possession may be tilted toward one team’s end.
Match stats
Below the territory plot are six stats that can help describe how teams played. Because these metrics aren’t as familiar as shot counts or possession percentages, they’re represented by both a number (with the team that did “better” highlighted in its colour) as well as a zero-to-five circle rating system that shows the team’s rank compared to all other Premier League games since 2018-19.
Start distance: The average distance in metres from the start of a team’s possessions to the centre of the opponent’s goal. Lower numbers are better here, obviously.
Progression: The average percentage of the remaining distance to the centre of the opponent’s goal gained from start to end of a team’s possessions. “End” here is the start location of the last action in the possession, so just hoofing it to the other team’s goalkeeper doesn’t count as progressing the ball.
Circulation: The indirectness of a team’s passing, calculated as progressive pass distance (distance gained toward the opponent’s goal) divided by total pass distance, then subtracted from one so that higher numbers represent more circulation — that is, sideways and backwards passing. It may sound like a bad thing to pass in the wrong direction, but higher circulation numbers are associated with better results.
Build-ups: The number of possessions that had a shot or touch in the opponent’s box after at least eight passes.
Fast breaks: The number of possessions that had a shot or touch in the opponent’s box within 15 seconds of a touch in the attacking team’s first 40 per cent of the pitch.
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High press: The number of defensive actions in the highest 60 per cent of the pitch per 100 opponent pass attempts in the same zone. This is basically the reciprocal of a popular high-pressing metric called PPDA, except that in this version recoveries and opponent long balls are counted along with defensive actions as indicators of high pressure.
Shot maps
At the bottom of the dashboard are side-by-side pitch maps showing each team’s shots, where the size of a circle corresponds to a chance’s expected goal value. Goals are filled in and have a line from the shot to where the ball crossed the goal line.
You didn’t think we’d forget expected goals, did you? Below the shot map is each team’s xG total, with the team that had the better chances shaded in its colour. We stuck these numbers down at the bottom instead of up top by the score because despite what you’ll sometimes read on social media, expected goals aren’t really meant to be used for single games and don’t necessarily tell us who “should” have won a match any more than the myriad other ways we can measure threat, territory, control and so on.
Pass networks
In the wide-format version of our match dashboard, the pitch map on each side shows a team’s pass network during their longest passage of the game with an unchanged lineup. The location of each player’s circle indicates the median location of their touches in possession; the size of the circle corresponds to the number of passes they attempted; and the thickness of each line between the circles shows how many passes one player completed to the other on a per-90-minute basis (minimum five completed passes per 90).
Pass networks aim to provide a high-level snapshot of where players played in their team’s possession shape, how involved they were in the passing game and which team-mates they interacted with the most. They’re limited by a lack of off-ball data and the hopelessness of capturing football’s liquid geometries in one still image, but they can still be a helpful point of reference.
Line-ups and player stats
The lineup cards below each passing network show players’ listed positions, subs on and off and total minutes played (including stoppage time). On the right side are icons representing goals, assists and team leaders in certain stats:
Progressive passes (two arrows pointing up): Completed passes at least 10 metres long that gain at least 25 per cent of the remaining distance to the centre of the opponent’s goal.
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Progressive receptions (target): Progressive passes received.
Dribbling (zig-zag arrow): Progressive carries (minimum 10 metres and 15 per cent progression) plus successful take-ons.
Expected goals (crosshairs): Non-penalty expected goals (shots weighted by their probability of scoring).
Expected assists (magic wand): Expected goals assisted.
Defensive actions (shield): Tackles, interceptions, clearances, recoveries and fouls.
Touches (gear): Total on-ball actions.
