Goal contribution of the best players

Griezmann made several "pre-assists" in NT, lately.

 

Nice one! How many assists did Baggio make, something like 110-115?

 

For what's worth (of course depends +/- 10 points on the version used etc.):

Diego Maradona. pic.twitter.com/tC3xUoLCFU

— Goalimpact (@Goalimpact) November 25, 2020

 

I think it's true what you say, in terms of the problems and variations making the 'goal impact' (and generally results with/without a player) somewhat misleading potentially, although factually correct (but there is no account of what might have happened without a player if he didn't play and eg the 1986 World Cup is very likely a prime example where Maradona's presence was crucial to success and progression, which your method would reflect - we can't know for sure that Argentina don't get past England or Belgium without him but although actually for the first 75% of Argentina-England I think it's fair to say Argentina in general as a team played the better, there would seem a greater possibility they don't get to the Final, or they lose the Final if he wasn't available logically I think, and your method would reflect it too).

But, on the other hand, your method can also under-value certain players if they made a big contribution to a smoothly running team and the flow of the game going in his team's favour (as well as defensive contributions), made a lot of pre-assists perhaps and opened up spaces for others, and also if they played with great team-mates and/or in some competitions that were high scoring (so the stats of team-mates get bumped up).

Cruyff is a good example I think, in the same way Maradona is a good example of the problems with trying to use 'Goal Impact' alone. And without having calculated it right now, again we could look at the World Cup goals/assists of Cruyff and get a more positive calculation (notwithstanding that he would still be positively impacting the Dutch total football game outside of the goals and assists in the ways I was talking about).

I don't think there is a way to make a ranking using numbers and say this is it, this is factually a list of the best/greatest players (or even 'attacking players') but your data is still interesting of course, and the more you can find in terms of reliable assist information for various players even moreso (by the way most Serie A 1980s, 1990s goals are probably on Youtube I think, so that could help for Baggio...and actually I remember seeing that in 86/87 Maradona himself had a lot of pre-assists, not reflected with your method...just as they won't be for Bergkamp or whoever else who had a significant amount in certain seasons).

Just talking of Maradona and Cruyff: the pure data for goals/assists per game will under-sell Maradona, while the corrected 'percentage contribution' data will under-sell Cruyff (perhaps less so if we were looking at goals/assists rate of the whole league rather than his teams alone, which is another angle to look at potentially as someone mentioned earlier...while also suggesting International games could be focused on...although to be fair different eras would still be hard to compare). Maybe for the earlier years for each it would be a closer comparison (the Argentinos/Boca years and the 1960s Ajax years for example), in leagues which were different but had some parallels. The La Liga of the 1970s and Serie A of the 1980s are perhaps harder to compare, and the trajectory of their impact is a bit different (both arguably showing their top form immediately, but Cruyff influencing Barca's greatest success of the period in that moment, while Maradona led Napoli to trophies later on).

I think most people wouldn't think Batistuta was a better/greater player than Cruyff for example (even just as attacker), but as you say most people think Maradona is way above top 200 too.

Pele (even if assist data is reliable and fully discovered) would also suffer with the contribution percentage method to an extent because of the players he played alongside (so his percentages diminish, even if in literal terms it helped the success of the teams he was in...not to say he wasn't crucial himself at least in 1958 if we talk World Cups, even if they went on to win in 1962 after his injury anyway too).

 

Actually, looking at the tables (and the final column for each year especially), and thinking deeper, I would say that Maradona at Argentinos Juniors at least is not really comparable to Cruyff at Ajax in the 60s, because Argentinos were much more reliant on Maradona in terms of goals/assists, but overall a less successful team.

Maradona's 1986/87 calculation (Scudetto season) does indeed seem a bit low (in comparison to a majority of his other seasons) and those pre-assists being factored in would remedy that a bit (in terms of 'overall' contribution to goals - I know it becomes an impossible stat to use though unless we had footage of every goal from the start of each move for every player!). While Maradona and Cruyff are very close indeed at nearly 50% each for the NT overall, and not too far apart for 84/85 (first season at Napoli) and 73/74 (first season at at that moment, based on previous season, underachieving Barcelona) either.

 

I'm not sure if penalties won are being included as 'assists' (if not, it's a flaw in a way because certainly someone winning a penalty is a contribution to the goal going in). If so then Cruyff at 1974WC is a bit over 50%, although otherwise more in line with his career average 'contribution rate'.

Maradona's rate in 1986 is obviously very high for percentage goal contribution.

 

Good posts PDG.

Yeah, I'm not saying it is perfect (though I think the criticism of Trachta misses that there is an in-built correction for team-mates and opponents strength) but it is just that this is literally also "goal contribution" by an individual player, just from a different angle. It rewards relentless consistency over moments of brilliance. So it rewards Van Dijk at Celtic (with the records set there) over the moments of excellence by a Philippe Albert (his one-two and dribble goal against Germany, his chip against Manchester United etc.).

There is no question that down here there are people too who see Maradona as the best ever, such as Van Hanegem and Hiddink. Van Gaal though said a few weeks earlier Messi (as well as Cruijff secondarily) is far superior and that he wouldn't place him in his personal top 10. He couldn't comment on Pele.

What I'm definitely convinced about is that the narrative about poor one man teams is vastly exaggerated. Poor teams don't have player of the seasons in France or Spain in their ranks, or five Copa Libertadores winners in the same season. Even then, it is not certain that replaying the tournament gives the same outcome. It is more about being able to compete than having a team like Brazil in 1970 (with six months preparation on top).

Anyway, don't want to take it off tangent (more relevant comments are on the first page) but I posted it because it tackles the 'goal contribution' thing from a different angle (there are different versions/tweaks of it though, so that in one JC14/Puskas is number one while in the other top 25 all-time; in a database of a million players ? still not a huge difference).

 

Yeah, I guess both ways can be skewed somewhat by sample size (for example when a player retires) and circumstances (team-mates, without a great players direct help or without him on the pitch, having a goal fest against a depleted team or one down to 9 men or something like that).

Also role within a team (if a player becomes more of a deep playmaker and organiser, which could apply a bit to 1980s Cruyff I guess even though he got plenty of goals and especially assists considering his age and had good reviews and surely a positive impact on team form/success - it's just though, as the goal contribution method shows, his goals/assists are not a huge proportion of those of the Ajax/Feyenoord teams he played in at that time), and where a player goes to play at each stage of his career.

I think both methods can show something, indications about what the player delivered to his teams at a particular time, or on average through his career. But neither can really be taken as definitive for a set of 'best player ever' calculations I think.

When I had a go at that top 500, purely based on a theoretical drafting of players into squads, I did end up with a number of Maradona team-mates in there, but I think partly because of how they were proven to play with him (so I put several of them in the same squad as him including the likes of Bagni and Burruchaga whose places could be in doubt otherwise among the 500 names I guess for example). I did put several Cruyff team-mates in too of course, mainly from the 70s teams of Ajax and the Netherlands.

 

Maybe even unprecedented in a single major tournament

Argentina scored 15 goals on route to winning the 1986 world cup

If we want to get real technical about this 'goal contribution' stuff Maradona scored,assisted,pre assisted or was involved in the passing moves/build up Of 12 of those goals:80%

He was an offensive machine in that tournament
his influence grew as the tournament progressively became harder

Cruyff 74 id argue peaked way too early
just one of many reasons why they are not alike imo as far as peak WC performance is concerned

Along with the 5 goals+5 opta assists there is this


0:46

And this

1:06

These are technically also 'goal contributions'

The KO stage in particular was 'supernatural'
Gab Marcotti said something like this yesterday too

Maradona for 4 minutes was different and anybody who saw it could not forgot


He scored with his hand in minute 51 and got away with it
The self proclaimed hand of god
The most audacious act of cheating in football history

The fact is people who don't play by the rule book can sometimes be heroic
Soccer is a sport with amenable laws and regulations
So are most professions in general
That is the nature of human nature
What is acceptable/ethical/appropiate today was not acceptable yesterday and what will be acceptable tomorrow is not deemed correct today

For some winning is the sole objective
You win and how you win is immaterial
There is also the David/goliath backdrop
An impoverished nation playing against an aggressive superpower with questionable 'military interventions'

Some could argue it was not even a level playing field to begin with
And if Maradona had 'cheated' in sport(a small victory in the grand scheme of things)
Many superpowers have also cheated to place themselves in the positions they find themselves in today(stealing land,natural resources etc)




Just when spectators were digesting what had just happened he scored in minute 55 the greatest goal many people had seen in their lives

A 4 minutes interval between these 2 moments encapsulating the daring attitude and genius of Maradona

A little forgotten moment but a Few seconds after the kick off from that goal he did a sick roulette in the midfield leaving 2 English players for dead


Maradona was brilliant
I said many times statistical arguments can be made for and against every player and I enjoy these debates as much as the next guy

Not for Diego

The fact that according to @Trachta10 's data maradona was as integral to his teams offense as any player has been is not surprising

What he did with the ball was

 

Good work on finding/working out Baggio's from Fiorentina onwards mate (I'm not sure but maybe my Youtube tip helped and can for other players by just searching game by game for highlights/goals).

I suppose in his case his teams did score a decent amount of goals when he wasn't on the pitch yet when he was on the pitch his contribution to the end product was high (looking at the GF column vs the G+A c% column). His case can also be one where his contributions and ratings don't always match I think (see DBS Calcio or Vegan's thread about Serie A ratings).

One thing I am thinking (which would change the comparison between Cruyff I mentioned before, and Baggio indeed as an example) is it might be better to use non-penalty goals only on balance (or as a second option to show a different perspective). Given penalties won, and certainly pre-assists are not included if I understand correctly, and to change the balance a bit away from goalscorers who get a lot from penalties (it is a good sign if they take/score them but it is also a situation created by others and where the taker is expected to score on average). Where a player won his own penalty and scored it then ideally those would be included, but it would get complicated and too difficult to get info for all players (just taking out penalties scored could be easier although for older players I'm still not sure - I can't recall whether for example some sites do show Pele's penalties game by game or by season).

 

On the other hand, something which might bump up Baggio's data could be if any assists do remain unidentified, and I do wonder whether his NT total should be higher off the top of my head (eg he got an assist vs England in Italia 90 unless my memory is playing tricks - not from 1990 itself but whenever I last looked at the highlights, and then in the post below I credited him with 3 in a game vs Scotland alone during 93/94 - the post was on the 1993/94 season discussion thread by comme and I wasn't only/mainly talking about Baggio but I'm just pasting the whole thing as the video is clear to see anyway):

 

For sure an approach where penalties scored are excluded and penalties won included (he had a fairly high number of these) will bump him up considerably - and someone like Gullit for example, and Zidane obviously too. There is no single and uniform answer for this (just as the answer for best player!)

Including penalty shoot-outs, Cruijff took fourteen penalties in his career and converted twelve. One was shot high in the sky against AS Roma in 1983, in a shoot-out at a friendly tournament. Another bounced in the ground (some say: the mud) to the post in a league game while playing for Barcelona.

This 'bumping up' is true for the continental (89 games) and international games (48 games) as well; with IIRC you noticing previously his combined goals and assists rate is there about as good/better as his league rate, including assists in a few semi finals obviously (1975, 1976 etc.).

(remains a pity he only played 48 games for reasons that weren't always in his control - at the same time, of that generation only Ruud Krol was fortunate to end up with a healthy number of caps; and him overcoming that hurdle and dealing with this challenge - with Michels still coaching in Barcelona, flying up and down, in the middle of the '74 tournament - with the framework basically still in place in '78, is part of the story arc; even the greats can only bend the 'Overton window' to a limited degree, or at least do this very significantly in a limited number of areas. The players with the most caps of that generation are: Krol 83, Jansen 65, W. van de Kerkhof 63 (didn't play a minute in '74), Suurbier 60; Van Hanegem 52, Neeskens 49, Cruijff 48, R. van de Kerkhof 47, Rensenbrink 46 etc.)

I haven't forgotten your request for an A and B team!
https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/f...o-voted-for-who.1597402/page-10#post-39098647

 

Yeah, I'm sure that will be true. Worth looking at I think anyway (at least taking penalties scored out as a supplementary exercise that should be achievable for most players, and then recalculating the contribution %).

When looking at assists contribution he does already seem to come out right at the top end with Trachta's method and sums anyway I think. As does Figo, although in his case he's right down at the bottom among the players looked at overall due to a low goals contribution % in most seasons (surely other notable players who were actually central midfielders would be similar in that respect - Figo did have some spells himself as more of a CAM of course for Sporting, a little bit occasionally at Barcelona and also for Portugal including as late as Euro 2000 and afterwards, and a little bit for Real Madrid too, but was mainly a winger in prime years - not strictly a midfield winger always as sometimes in more of a 4-3-3, but not really as an outright attacker/inverted goal oriented wing forward at all I suppose). So maybe the goals contribution and assists contribution tables are interesting alone, although of course I understand why Trachta would do a combined one too, or as primary table ultimately.

Discovering all penalties won for all games could be tricky or impossible I suppose. So maybe the only option is just to have a version with non-penalty goals plus narrow assists, as an end product contribution rate minus penalties (even though denying both a goal and an assist when a player himself would dribble into the box and be fouled and then score the penalty himself would seem harsh - it's just that if we don't have complete data for every player it would be unfair to credit some players for that and not others, even if uncertain/unverified assist data could give the same issue - Trachta does seem to be doing his best to find the best sources for assists to be fair though).

 

I disagree. Maradona in 1986 was the best World Cup tournament but others as Eusebio or Cruijff - directly creating goals against any of the big teams they played against - are in the same ballpark. Not miles or a whole tier behind.

See the 'Castrol Index' for evidence, the average opposition strength (by Elo - a huge difference genuinely), the 'Doppelgangers tool' andsoforth. I can expand on this, but I don't, because it will not compute here anyway and will be shoved aside regardless.

Yes, you can justifiably say players like these faded later in the tournament, but on the other hand, England 1966 and Brazil + Germany 1974 were (defensively) better teams as any of the teams Maradona played against. Yet these players were still productive, with quality moments, and a goal creating dribble through the middle as well.

As an aside, if we talk about goal involvement the way you do, then Cruijff was involved in 12 of the 15 goals = 80%. While of course the team was not set up that way necessarily. It was not the plan, how the team played, and not meant to be. Rather, he was the 2nd most frequent passer of his team (behind Haan), considerably more frequent as the usual world class attacking player.

Direct involvement was 9 of the 15 goals in 1974, as opposed to 10 of the 14 goals in 1986.

'Castrol Index' (a modification of the OPTA Index, with the pitch divided into more zones) is again not perfect, in particular for defenders, but works much better for attacking players really.


https://sport360.com/article/footba...nterview-why-barcelona-are-not-best-team-ever

It was the best but most likely not a tier on its own (for me).

This is a nice story but has little bearing on the balance of power and mechanisms in football, or sport in general.

Where if anything England was the developing nation (banned in Europe) and Argentina the one - at this point at least - with president Havelange and vice-president Grondona as ruling friends in FIFA, and playing on their home continent. Where the imperial Havelange personally handpicked the referees, including his own countrymen for the 1982 and 1986 finals.

The Tunisian referee of the quarter final wasn't chosen by the "aggressive superpower". More likely by the 'other guys'.

This wasn't a 'David vs Goliath' in football. That's mythology. At best both were Goliath here, at worst England was at this point the 'David' in the story, and unaccustomed to playing international football.

East Germany was also an "impoverished nation", just not in sports and their position in the international network (with also in their case friends and allies around to help them).

Argentina was the "aggressor" in the Falklands story. They attacked that island.

If anything it is "cheating" to disregard the self-determination of the citizens, who - as it has always been - with percentages of 85-90% or higher want to belong to the UK, while at the same time only 30% (or lower) identify themselves as British. The accepted 'fair play' is to accept the will of the people, who at the same time don't see themselves as British.

Alas, this is off subject.

You're wrong (as often and/or almost always): this roulette happened just after the goal by Lineker, not after the second Argentina goal.