Attacking Influence Assessment - City Players
This is a preliminary (work-in-progress) bubble chart mapping players to four basic quadrants representing attacking influence. It is based on a scoring system I am developing in an attempt to create my own baseline method of assessing player influence on attacking play in the league over the course of the season (I may use it for predictive analysis for several buy-in draft Fantasy Football leagues next year). This is based on the official Premier League statistics (
https://www.premierleague.com/stats/top/players/goals?se=79) and my own formula for weighting contributions (goals and assists) and (big) missed chances, factoring in minutes played (to recognise relative opportunity to contribute). The higher the Attacking Contribution Score, the more the player contributed to our attacking play. The higher the Chances Missed Score, the less clinical the player’s finishing. The larger the player ‘bubble’, the larger their net influence on attacking play. This is meant to help assess variance in overall contribution to attack and identify consistency and potential for improvement (and thus, players that may be ‘major influencers’ next year based on other factors, such as additional playing time, changes to team role, or further development).
This version only includes City players who have played at least 500 minutes and have contributed at least one goal or assist. The ‘ideal’ quadrant for player position is the bottom-right quadrant, for obvious reasons. The unnamed player on the graph is Vinny(due to total net influence being so small), which is not surprising.
There are much better, much more detailed overall assessment systems out there, of course, but most are behind a paywall and I enjoy creating these sorts of assessment systems (and want to have a project to fill the void left by the Summer football break, not counting the World Cup, of course). I am still working through the scoring formula to make it more accurate/representative, and plan to create similar charts for previous seasons for year-over-year comparisons, but I thought this initial effort was worth sharing for discussion. I may eventually expand out to Opta or WhoScored stats for more granular performance analysis. I am posting this chart to a few player threads for reference—not sure it deserves its own thread.
It’s worth keeping in my that this does not reflect the overall contribution of the player (attacking and defensive play, nor intangible influence). I am thinking about how that could be quantitatively (and comprehensively) assessed and, if I am able to put something together, I think we would find Kevin, David, and Fernandinho would be up with Sterling and Aguero for overall contribution.
Jesus related observations:
1) He is the only ‘middling’ player in the assessment universe, with his Attacking Contribution score being around the median, while having the joint highest Missed Chances score along side Sergio.
2) Small improvements in *either* chance creation or conversion rate will see Gabby move much closer to the bottom-right quadrant (as opposed to players like Gundogan, who would need to substantially improve chance creation to see similar movement) and increase his overall influence (which is currently similar to Ilkay’s, despite having an Attacking Contribution Scor nearly three times higher).
3) This likely masks his overall contribtion to our play, not factoring in his key passing, high press, movement, and defensive contributions, which means it is a somewhat bias view of his influence.
3) Gabby still has huge potential to increase is influence on our attacking play (obvious but still worth saying for the moaners ;-) ).