Game theory | Brexit on the pitch

The Achilles heel of English football

By D.A. | NEW YORK

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.

Predictably, productive passing was the not the forte of this England lineup. As a group, they made a pass leading to a shot in the penalty area once every 22 minutes during the 2015-16 Premier League season. The top team in generating these passes, Arsenal, did so once every 14 minutes. England’s starters were closest to Everton, in seventh place on the list.

The player most suited to the creative role was probably Dele Alli, the 20-year-old phenomenon who recently won the Professional Footballers’ Association Young Player of the Year award. He spent 704 of his 2,561 minutes for Tottenham in the position. However, he wasn’t the player who spent the most minutes pulling the strings for Tottenham. That was the club’s effervescent Danish star, Christian Eriksen.

In fact, most Premier League teams relied on non-English players to make things happen in attack. The only ones where an English player held the most sway were Crystal Palace (Jason Puncheon, uncapped at age 30), Sunderland (Adam Johnson, currently imprisoned for activities with an underage girl), and Everton (Ross Barkley). Mr Barkley was in France with the England team but sat on the bench, inexplicably, for all four matches. In essence, the English side was Everton without Everton’s best passer.

This doesn’t mean English clubs should stop importing skilled players and give more minutes to home-grown talents. Rather, England needs to cultivate the creative role—one that doesn’t always go to the tallest, fastest or strongest player, but rather to the one who controls the ball and can surprise defenders with his improvisation and ideas. Scouts in continental Europe and South America routinely look for scrawny magicians. If England can produce Derren Brown, why not the country’s next great No. 10?

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