I don't want to discuss this but your stats are wrong in every ways. You bring Opta's stats from what, 2003 when they clearly didn't define stats same way as they do now. And these are all outdated and can not compare to nowaday's. And everyone can see dribble and RUN stats, not just dribble. You won't be able to make Zidane had better dribbling stats than Messi. That is impossible. Unless you use Zidane Euro 2000 to Messi 2022 World Cup dribbling stats.
Here is a quick comparison, here from old stats that Denilson had 38 successful dribbles in 1998 World Cup or Thuram had 33. Here from Opta's stats that Denilson had 20 dribbles or Thuram had 12 dribbles instead. Denilson https://www.sofascore.com/player/denilson-de-oliveira-araujo/1748 Thuram https://www.sofascore.com/player/lilian-thuram/2077 See the difference???
Lol, this is great. And just to illustrate further, Michael Laudrup is listed with 33 dribbles and runs there, but only had 6 successful dribbles in that World Cup (as per SofaScore). This also obviously shows that the success rates on dribbles and runs are (not at all surprisingly) much lower. What you’ve posted demonstrates that already, but of further note, for instance, the highest dribbles and runs success rate there was Asanovic with an 88% success rate. But we also know that he had a 57% dribble success rate in that World Cup (again, as per SofaScore). In other words, nothing about dribbles and runs stats tells us virtually anything about dribbles stats. The individual in question surely knows he’s wrong about this stuff, though (indeed, he’s admitted it in the past)—he just somehow can’t bring himself to publicly admit it now, and clearly lashes out with personal attacks instead of doing so. Honestly, what’s even more confusing to me than that, though, is how someone who purports to have watched large numbers of matches of both players could ever possibly think that Zidane dribbled people more than Messi (indeed, the stat he was insisting was dribbles for Zidane would have had Zidane dribbling more per 90 mins in a league season than Messi ever did). It’s just *manifestly* obvious that that’s not the case if you’ve watched both players play even a little bit. To have watched both players a lot and somehow think this makes sense (and to actually be so sure it makes sense that you double down and get very nasty and self-righteous when someone shows you, for the second time, that you’ve misinterpreted the data) just shows stunning delusion about football matches he’s watched and/or a completely bad-faith agenda. Either that or he’s lying about having actually watched both players play much. Any of which is highly discrediting. And it’s not the first time for this sort of thing. Not even close. For instance, earlier in this very thread, this same poster insisted, obviously incorrectly, that Kylian Mbappe had by far the most progressive passes of anyone in the World Cup, and more than 2x more progressive passes than Messi. He insisted it even after being told the correct numbers, and indeed once again got extremely nasty to me in doing so. Of course, anyone who watched the World Cup—or even knows the faintest bit about those two players’ roles—would know that that couldn’t be true (indeed, the reality was that Messi had almost 3x more progressive passes than Mbappe). I don’t know exactly what the correct explanation is for him consistently being incredibly sure of manifestly false conclusions, but it is quite discrediting.
Hey folks - we don't allow personal stuff here so if you dislike someone so much that you need to keep attacking and reporting - then please use ignore or I'll just thread ban you both. Thanks.
CR7 De Bruyne, kaka, etc all this for me is shit .lol please tell me a game when messi did a goal like this???? and this other???? plz show to me and you change my opinion messi is number one but it will never happened? do you know why? because MESSI IS NOT A GENIUS , HES NOT A TOP PLAYER AS RIVELLINO CRUYFF REINALDO ZICO BERGKAMP ETC he is A NORMAL PLAYER supported by the media (internet , sports media , tv, etc)
Reviewing the numbers, Messi had similar performances in Copa America 2021 and World Cup 2022. Messi in Copa America 2021: 4 goals and 5 assists (9 out of 13: 0.69% of Argentina's goals). In WC: 7 goals and 3 assists (10 of 15: 0.66%). But four goals from PK in the World Cup against 1 goal from PK in the Copa America. In both tournaments, Messi created 21 chances. And he was named MVP of both competition. Hard to see players at this level back to back
I have previously posted substantial information regarding Messi’s contributions to various non-goalscoring areas. To recap a bit, this information shows that Messi is pretty clearly the world’s premier progressor of the ball in the attacking half (through passing + carries with the ball). I have also posted information about final ball playmaking—in which we see that Messi is, unsurprisingly has a strong argument for being the very best in the world in creating big chances (indeed, he’s only even rivaled in this era by KDB, Angel Di Maria, and Neymar). Analysis of Involvement in Possession Game But there’s another area of play that elite playmakers get involved in besides progressing the ball and making the final ball. And that’s simply being involved in possession play—keeping the ball while the team probes around trying to create openings. Of course, different teams do this differently (i.e. some are slower tempo than others), resulting in having different numbers of passes. But one simple way of measuring a player’s involvement in this that accounts for this is to measure what percent of a team’s touches in the middle and attacking thirds of the pitch a player gets. My contention is that he contributes to this area of play much more similarly to attacking midfielders as opposed to forwards, and that he in fact is elite at it even as compared to attacking midfielders (and as will be demonstrated below, the data supports this contention). Description of the Analytical Metric Used So, to illustrate this, I will compare Messi’s stats (percent of his team’s middle and attacking third touches) to various players. I will include six top players that can fairly be described as attacking midfielders: Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Bernardo Silva, Mason Mount, Kai Havertz, and Christopher Nkunku. I will also compare this to the stats of four dedicated goalscorers: Benzema, Ronaldo, Suarez, and Lewandowski. Finally, for comparison purposes, I will also include four players who can fairly be described as central midfielders: Modric, Rakitic, Gundogan, as well as one who plays a bit of a deeper midfield role in Joshua Kimmich (just the last three years for him, since he didn’t play as a midfielder before that). What I will specifically be doing is taking the player’s touches in the middle and attacking thirds per 90 minutes and dividing it by his team’s total touches in the middle and attacking third per 90 minutes. I will do this for each player for each league season (starting in 2017-2018 when we have this data from) that they played at least 1500 minutes in, and then will report that player’s average percentage. So, for example, if Player A had 10% of their team’s middle- and attacking-third touches one year, 13% another year, 12% a third year, 9% another, and then had another season where they only played 1200 minutes, then the number I’d report out would be 11% (because (10+13+12+9)/4 = 11). Note that I’m also only counting seasons in the top 5 leagues (in part because data outside of that is not always there, and because I don’t want to do things like count Mason Mount’s season in the Championship). Average Percent of Team’s Middle-Third & Attacking-Third Touches per 90 mins in League Seasons from 2017-2018 through 2021-2022 1. Joshua Kimmich: 13.77% 2. Ivan Rakitic: 12.98% 3. Luka Modric: 12.57% 4. David Silva: 12.50% 5. Lionel Messi: 12.48% 6. Ilkay Gundogan: 11.90% 7. Kevin De Bruyne: 11.66% 8. Mason Mount: 10.15% 9. Kai Havertz: 10.09% 10. Bernardo Silva: 9.59% 11. Christopher Nkunku: 9.49% 12. Cristiano Ronaldo: 8.64% 13. Karim Benzema: 8.36% 14. Luis Suarez: 6.67% 15. Robert Lewandowski: 5.83% Conclusion As we can see, Messi not only looks like an attacking midfielder in terms of percent involvement in his teams play in the middle and attacking thirds, but his numbers are near the very top of attacking midfielders, and actually quite similar to the types of numbers that CM’s get (though of course, as compared to AMs, those CMs have a different looking breakdown in terms of what percent of their touches are in the middle vs. attacking third). Meanwhile, players who are dedicated goalscorers are nowhere near him. Thus, as we can see, Messi’s overall involvement in his team’s attacks look like elite involvement as compared to attacking midfielders, and is not even in the same galaxy as that of dedicated goalscorers.
Some more analysis: We have already discussed dribbling from the perspective of ball progression. But obviously, in a lot of cases, dribbles aren’t really so much about progressing the ball, but rather are about directly fashioning a chance. How good is Messi at doing that? Well, there’s actually a pretty decent way of measuring this, found on FBref. That website has stats called “shot-creating actions” and “goal-creating actions.” Something is a shot- or goal-creating action if it is one of the two offensive actions directly leading to a shot/goal. And the website tracks these actions for each player by category, so we know how many shot-creating dribbles and goal-creating dribbles players have (the website calls dribbles “take-ons” but the definition of what it is is the same). We have these stats from 2017-2018 onwards (which, I note, is a period that certainly doesn’t encompass Messi’s dribbling peak). We will look at these numbers for League + CL combined, and on a per 90 mins basis—comparing Messi to some of the greatest dribblers of this era. Shot-Creating Dribbles per 90 mins (League + CL/Europa from 2017-2018 onwards) 1, Lionel Messi: 1.03 2. Eden Hazard: 0.83 3. Kylian Mbappe: 0.76 4. Neymar: 0.71 5. Vinicius Jr: 0.65 6. Hatem Ben Arfa: 0.61 7. Ousmane Dembele: 0.55 8. Mo Salah: 0.54 9. Paolo Dybala: 0.50 10. Sergio Aguero: 0.50 11. Riyad Mahrez: 0.46 12. Cristiano Ronaldo: 0.45 13. Franck Ribery: 0.44 14. Sadio Mane: 0.40 15. Jadon Sancho: 0.39 16. Angel Di Maria: 0.36 17. Gareth Bale: 0.35 18. Joaquin: 0.35 19. Andres Iniesta: 0.33 (note: only one season’s data for Iniesta) 20. Arjen Robben: 0.24 (note: not many years’ data for Robben) Goal-Creating Dribbles per 90 mins (League + CL from 2017-2018 onwards) 1. Lionel Messi: 0.19 2. Kylian Mbappe: 0.19 3. Eden Hazard: 0.17 4. Mo Salah: 0.15 5. Neymar: 0.13 6. Ousmane Dembele: 0.11 7. Riyad Mahrez: 0.11 8. Franck Ribery: 0.10 9. Sadio Mane: 0.09 10. Vinicius Jr: 0.09 11. Sergio Aguero: 0.08 12. Jadon Sancho: 0.08 13. Paolo Dybala: 0.07 14. Cristiano Ronaldo: 0.07 15. Gareth Bale: 0.06 16. Angel Di Maria: 0.05 17. Hatem Ben Arfa: 0.04 18. Andres Iniesta: 0.04 19. Joaquin: 0.04 20. Arjen Robben: 0.03 As we can see, even during a time period well outside his dribbling peak, Messi fashions chances and goals with dribbles more than anyone else, and indeed no one is even close to him in terms of shot-creating dribbles per 90 minutes. This is, of course, not surprising, but is worth demonstrating with data.
Following on with some further data, let’s move to an area that’s definitely not Messi’s strength: defending. While Messi plays an attacking midfield role on attack, he doesn’t have an attacking midfield role on defense—since he does not put forth a high work rate. That said, in the era of gegenpressing, it’s well understood that it is very effective from an attack perspective to win the ball back from an opposing player in the attacking third, which can often create great chances. Given Messi’s notoriously bad work rate—especially in his later years—we’d expect Messi to come off quite badly in this regard, even compared to most forwards. But it turns out that that’s not the case. In fact, when it comes to these really high-value defensive actions, Messi is actually good. We will measure two things on this question. First, we will look at tackles in the attacking third per 90 minutes. Second, we will look at defensive actions that were shot-creating actions (as described above, this means a defensive action that was one of the two actions directly leading to a shot. As with before, we have this data from FBref for League + CL/Europa from 2017-2018 onwards, and we will measure it on a per 90 mins basis. We will compare Messi to other attacking players, to see how Messi stacks up in high-value defensive actions compared to other players at the position he nominally lines up at. I have included a wide range of players here, including strikers, wingers, inside forwards, and attacking midfielders, so that we can get a sense of where Messi stands in general amongst these various sorts of attacking players. Tackles in the Attacking Third per 90 mins in League + CL/Europa (2017-2018 onwards) 1. Kevin De Bruyne: 0.43 2. Bernardo Silva: 0.42 3. Sadio Mane: 0.41 4. Neymar: 0.32 5. Angel Di Maria: 0.32 6. Vinicius Jr.: 0.30 7. Ousmane Dembele: 0.29 8. Antoine Griezmann: 0.28 9. David Silva: 0.26 10. Mo Salah: 0.25 11. Gareth Bale: 0.25 12. Lionel Messi: 0.23 13. Luis Suarez: 0.23 14. Kai Havertz: 0.22 15. Robert Lewandowski: 0.20 16. Olivier Giroud: 0.19 17. Sergio Aguero: 0.18 18. Eden Hazard: 0.17 19. Son Heung-Min: 0.16 20. Karim Benzema: 0.16 21. Zlatan Ibrahimovic: 0.14 22. Kylian Mbappe: 0.13 23. Harry Kane: 0.12 24. Erling Haaland: 0.11 25. Romelu Lukaku: 0.10 26. Ciro Immobile: 0.10 27. Cristiano Ronaldo: 0.08 Defensive Shot-Creating Actions per 90 mins in League + CL/Europa (2017-2018 onwards) 1. Lionel Messi: 0.06 2. Vinicius Jr.: 0.06 3. Kevin De Bruyne: 0.05 4. Sergio Aguero: 0.05 5. Zlatan Ibrahimovic: 0.05 6. Olivier Giroud: 0.05 7. David Silva: 0.04 8. Kai Havertz: 0.04 9. Sadio Mane: 0.04 10. Ousmane Dembele: 0.04 11. Robert Lewandowski: 0.04 12. Neymar: 0.04 13. Harry Kane: 0.04 14. Son Heung-min: 0.03 15. Mo Salah: 0.03 16. Eden Hazard: 0.03 17. Angel Di Maria: 0.02 18. Antoine Griezmann: 0.02 19. Bernardo Silva: 0.02 20. Luis Suarez: 0.02 21. Cristiano Ronaldo: 0.02 22. Ciro Immobile: 0.01 23. Gareth Bale: 0.01 24. Kylian Mbappe: 0.01 25. Erling Haaland: 0.01 26. Romelu Lukaku: 0.01 27. Karim Benzema: 0.01 What do we see here? Well, in terms of defensive actions that directly lead to a shot attempt, Messi is elite amongst attacking players (though I’d caution that the numbers here are low enough that this measure is subject to a good deal of statistical randomness). This reflects that he is able to make defensive actions high up the pitch that instantly turn into an effective attack. In terms of making tackles high up the pitch, we see that Messi is actually pretty elite if you compared him only to strikers or star inside forward goalscorers. If you instead compared him to wingers and attacking midfielders, he’s not good, but he’s actually within the realm of normal, rather than being uniquely bad as you might expect. And, again, if you compare him to players that, like him, actually score a lot of goals, he comes out looking quite good here. Of course, there’s much more to defense than winning the ball back high up the pitch, and I’m not suggesting Messi is a good defender. Rather, what I’m referring to here is actually more about another source of attacking value—since, as Jurgen Klopp has pointed out, winning the ball high up the pitch is its own effective act of playmaking. And despite his low defensive work rate, Messi is actually pretty good at this—and actually pretty elite if you compare him only to players that score anywhere near like him. Finally, it’s very much worth noting that Messi actually puts forth more effort to win the ball back for Argentina, and the result is that, in the NT data we have (WC 2018, CA 2019, CA 2021, and WC 2022), he has 0.34 tackles in the attacking third per 90 minutes, and 0.21 defensive shot-creating actions per 90 minutes—numbers which are undeniably elite for any attacking player (though, again, low sample size).
Here it is called dribbles So that means the stats you brought up (which were good btw) were outdated and can not compare to nowaday. You can easily see the difference (like Thuram had 38 completed dribbles with 75% successful rate while in reality he had 12 with 52% rate).
Btw, OPTA did have this article, Messi 14 v Maradona 86, worth a read if you like https://www.statsperform.com/resource/revisionist-mystery-messi-maradona-argentina-world-cup/ Their conclusion: "If Higuaín had scored, we might be talking about Messi’s tournament on the same level as Maradona’s. If we left it at goals and wins as we did in 1986, we’d potentially be at four goals Messi, five goals Maradona and one World Cup trophy each. We might even compare the beauty of his 10-touch run starting 45.2 metres from goal on his improbable finish against Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Goal of the Century. He didn’t get it done in the final, but given the difference in the two matchups, would Maradona have? The German midfield dictated the match in 2014 in a way Argentina didn’t allow West Germany to in 1986, despite their withdrawn position, and the data will tell you neither Messi nor Maradona had an overriding say in that failure or success. So which player was better during their moment in history? We’ll leave that up to you to decide and discuss with a new level of objective information. What we – or the data, rather – will tell you is Maradona wasn’t a one-man team. No matter how intricate the analysis has become in the last 32 years or will become in the next 32, it will probably never tell us one-man teams win World Cups."
Messi dribbled more in 2021 than 2022. Messi 2022 edges cause he had great performance in the final and it is World Cup so yeah. Messi 2021 had a poor final vs Brazil.
That conclusively shuts the door on this issue—though, given how the success rates mapped on perfectly with the numbers, I think the truth was already quite clear prior to you posting this. Given this picture (which has the exact same numbers as the “Successful Dribbles and Runs” chart you posted earlier), it is 100% clear that OPTA used to use the terms “dribbles” and “dribbles and runs” interchangeably, and therefore what they called “successful dribbles” back then was the same as successful “dribbles and runs,” and is clearly not at all comparable to any more recent dribbles statistics that use today’s definition of the term. Which means Zidane did not get 5.95 dribbles per 90 minutes by today’s definition of the term “dribbles.” Thank you for posting this. May I ask where you found this stuff? For some reason, I can never actually reliably find OPTA data like this myself either through googling it or trying to find it on OPTA’s website.
It came from planetfootball.com but that site was dead from long ago. Though you can use waybackmachine to access it. https://web.archive.org/web/2003080...ootball.com/optamizer/about.asp?article=54974
Just a small point on this: I suspect that could be a 'Laudrup typo' and it should say Brian Laudrup - Michael was a fantastic dribbler in his peak of course, but played a midfield orchestrator role in that World Cup and Brian is among the top dribblers with OPTA data, as shown by Sofascore. Interesting comparing the sources that for example most of Ortega's 'dribbles and runs' appear to be dribbles, while for example Asanovic seems to have been credited with quite a lot of 'runs' (with a very high success rate for runs, however that is actually measured and however runs were defined - runs past a player do we think, without an actual dribble around or past him?). This gives a different perspective I saw (without actually playing down Messi's World Cup at all, though it may be factoring in the 'disappointing' performances at certain moments as they'd go towards the stats in some ways) Messi was brilliant, but James Rodriguez should have won the Golden Ball | For The Win (usatoday.com) I only say this as a light-hearted joke, and don't have anything against him (I chatted to him briefly on the Barcelona forum a little while ago actually) but it seems like Bada Bing might have written the article you provided anyway!
I think the "run" part is like carrying the ball forward without beating opponent. Not sure since those old stats are, well, old and outdated. We don't know how Opta tracked their stats back then. They changed their methods so now we have better stats and much more accurate. Opta's article above does analyze perfectly as they compare Messi's touches, passes, movements, teammates, opponents... to Maradona's. And they of course don't say who is better, imply they are equal, there is no difference. Bada Bing writes differently. With Opta, they have much more data, stats and that is the best (when you want a comparison all about stats, data of course).
Lol, good old Bada Bing! I do want to note one small thing about that article that relates to a prior discussion on this thread: The article includes a list of missed chances that had an xG of at least 10%. The chance against Germany in the finals—which people often say was a great chance that Messi should be expected to score—is not on that list, presumably meaning the xG of that chance was below 10%. Which does tend to validate the point I’ve made that that was not actually a particularly high-probability shot and that it’s not really fair to say it was a chance that Messi should be expected to score. Of course, I think the same goes for other chances in general—people very often say someone should’ve scored on chances where xG tells us the probability of scoring wasn’t high. But that chance having an xG of less than 10% does accentuate that point here. I’d previously merely conservatively said that I didn’t know the xG of that chance but was quite sure it was below 20%.
Yeah, I was joking about Bada Bing (for me it's a bit on the pro-Messi side in terms of the narrative and analysis without telling any lies or anything probably as far as the stats quoted are concerned, but having tried to stop getting into arguments on the thread I'd better not get too involved in that one again lol!), and as for runs you might be right, though I wondered if it had to be carried past an opponent without being very close to him or challenged by him or something (otherwise one run happens every time a player starts to run with the ball and ends when he loses the ball or gets rid of it or stops running? - who knows I guess!).
You might be right. Without looking back at the highlights again right now to refresh my memory about the chances, I'm thinking people maybe brought that up as a retort to the mentions of a Higuain miss (that 'cost Messi the World Cup' - similar to how it might be said that Rep not scoring cost Cruyff or whatever - chances and half chances do get missed of course)?