FBref Blog

Archive for the '2022 Men’s World Cup' Category

The Worst Goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup

21st November 2022

If you’re coming over from (Top ten goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup), you know the drill. All goalkeepers who’ve been officially named to World Cup squads (as of November 13) have, for this post, been sorted and ranked according to each of the categories tracked by Opta. This time, though, we’re looking for the guys who can’t keep a clean sheet to save their life; the guys who, through either poor positioning or slow reflexes, are letting in goals you’d expect a replacement-level keeper to save; the worst goalkeepers, statistically, at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Read the rest of this entry

Posted in 2022 Men's World Cup | Comments Off on The Worst Goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup

Top 10 Goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup

21st November 2022

Group stage, Qatar 2022. Your country is currently defending against one of those long, probing attacks; the ball is recycled from winger to central midfielder to center back, then switched across to the opposite winger. He takes a touch, jinks inside, looks up. The striker has dropped back to the top of the D. You’re screaming at the TV for someone to step up and get tight to him, but it’s too late – the ball comes in, and he hits it first time, a sweet curling effort that you can tell immediately is on target.

How confident are you feeling in that moment? How confident should you be feeling?

Advanced goalkeeping data from Opta via FBref can help answer that question. Post-shot expected goals, explained here in detail by StatsBomb’s Mike Goodman, measures shot stopping ability using the trajectory and pace of shots on target, as well as the location from where the shot was taken and whether any blocking defenders were in the frame of the goal. By subtracting goals allowed from post-shot expected goals (on a per-90 minutes basis), it’s possible to use the measure as a mark of goalkeeper quality; positive numbers indicate that the keeper is saving more shots than an average keeper would, and negative numbers indicate he’s letting a couple in that he really could’ve gotten.

Read the rest of this entry

Posted in 2022 Men's World Cup | Comments Off on Top 10 Goalkeepers at the 2022 World Cup

The 10 Best Playmakers in the World Right Now

14th November 2022

Measuring playmaking in soccer can get relatively complicated. The old adage about Lionel Messi being able to “do it on a wet Wednesday night in Stoke” applies here; Messi has 215 assists across his seventeen-year club career, which is obviously stellar, but it’s easier to get assists playing off peak Luis Suárez than it is Dwight Gayle. To separate out playmaking ability from team quality, we can look at a couple individual statistics that, when considered together, give a pretty good picture of how often a player makes things happen on a football pitch. 

Expected assists (the likelihood each completed pass becomes a goal assist given the pass type, phase of play, location and distance) per 90 minutes played are preferred to actual assists because they give a clearer idea of the quality of chance created, and xA is plotted here with shot-creating actions to capture players who create chances by dribbling or drawing fouls. Data is from Opta, filtered to include midfielders, fullbacks, and attackers in Europe’s top five leagues (English Premier League, Ligue 1, Serie A, La Liga, and the Bundesliga) with at least 500 minutes played in 2022/23. The final list was arrived at by averaging the percentile across the two categories; it’s subjective to say they matter equally, but hey, you have to start somewhere.

Read the rest of this entry

Posted in 2022 Men's World Cup, Greatest of All Time Lists | Comments Off on The 10 Best Playmakers in the World Right Now