IT WAS a Brexit almost as stunning as Britain’s vote to leave the European Union: on June 27th England’s national football team was eliminated from the 2016 UEFA European Championship by tiny Iceland. Although the Icelandic team deserves full credit for their impressive performance, England was always among the most vulnerable of the tournament’s heavyweights. In particular, the side suffered from a particularly grave case of an affliction that often haunts national teams. Whereas clubs are free to acquire any player that suits their needs, countries can only choose among their citizens. That means they frequently have a surplus at some positions and a grave deficit at others. In England’s case, the team boasted a bevy of trigger-happy shooters, but lacked a creative playmaker.
Because there are relatively few international matches, the samples of performance they contain tend to be too small to draw robust conclusions. Fortunately, far more data is available on English players’ contributions to their club teams.
At North Yard Analytics, my sports-data consulting firm, I apply an algorithm to figures from Opta on players’ actions and positioning in order to determine their principal roles. During the past Premier League season, England’s starters from the match against Iceland played a combined 1,429 minutes as their clubs’ primary playmakers—who typically receive the ball centrally in the attacking third of the field and seek to disrupt the defence by either delivering it immediately to forward player,d using runners on the wings, or taking it closer to goal themselves. Of the total of 29,011 England's starters played in the Premier League, that share came to less than 5%, or half of what you’d expect on a balanced team where each position received 1/11 of the minutes.