New Approaches to Premiership Assists and Goal Scoring

In football today OPTA create a vast array of stats. They say things like: who hits most crosses and how many are "completed": How many passes a player "completes" in both halves: Shots on target: Corners Completed etc. They produce a score of aggregate points which says the person did a lot in a game, the more points the better - points scored for passes, crosses, tackles, assists, goals, shots etc. However mainstream player assessment is not done using stats because a lot of the stats are quantative and tell us little. Personally I am not sure when I read OPTA stats what it tells me. The stats are raw and without context, for instance a runner free in the channels how often will be hit by a player? Context is the team you play for e.g Jermaine Pennant apparently hit 500 extremely fruitless crosses last year for Birmingham; was it his fault they were so ineffective?; did he hit them into packed penalty areas; did he frequently miss open strikers? No just macros measure of crosses and percentage completed.

I have a view that Wayne Rooney is a relatively [to his reputation] poor picker of a pass around the box and hence a better front striker. A view that is quite unpopular I might add. The point is no one can prove me right or wrong. Sure I can say look at last season his goals started to flow once partnered with Saha and when he played more forward. That for a player who only had 31% of his shots on target till he was pushed further forward i.e. he wasted the ball a lot with shooting and poor passing when deeper. I would like to think one day we will be able to more definitively quantify that. I think that but for his changing to front striker he would not have improved on his basically poor first year figures of 11 goals and 2 assists for United.

So why look at Assists when they are basically a context of team as much as the player getting them. David Beckham used to get 15 assists just pumping 300+ crosses into the box mostly and taking all the corners for Manchester United. Had he played for Charlton not so good one would bet. The simple answer is that anyone can determine assists and it does not need a weeks assessment frankly. Assists also do not answer how often a player hits the target of a pass in certain circumstances but WE have to start somewhere.

I do not know exactly how OPTA do assists but suspect the person who makes the last pass may well get it. Break out of defense beat 4 players lay the ball into an unmarked winger who hits an obvious pass to an unmarked striker and you get nothing more than satisfaction. Maybe it is more sophisticated than that. What WE are going to attempt to do is come up with better approaches and try several.

WE are going to try several methods 1st up the Hockey method where 0 to n assists will be handed out. 2nd method is to assign fractions/percentages of assists to players. 3rd is to assign fractions and percentages of the Goal itself to the scorer and the makers. The last 2 are inherently subjective but that should be interesting.