It has some, and will have more as stat-gathering in football matures and becomes more sophisticated. For example, people look at 'assist' figures for wingers or creative midfielders - but the assist figure depends on a striker doing his bit to qualify. So the newer, more sophisticated stat is 'chance creation' - passes which lead to shots on goal, regardless of whether they end in a goal or not. As mentioned a million times on RAWK, Downing, Adam and Henderson all figured very highly in 'chance creation' stats last season - Downing is 5th in 'chance creation' over the last 7 years, behind only Gerrard, Lampard, Fabregas and Giggs.
To that extent, I think you'd have to say it's been fairly successful, we have been creating chances all season without finishing them off. I think there is a practical limit to the usefulness of stats in football, because of the complexity of the game. There are undoubtedly some useful indicators, but I really don't think there is as much to be developed here as some make out. I'd be fascinated to find out what Comolli actually looks at.
There are some good points made in this post:
Say Downing's chances created. Putting the ball into the six yard is a chance created. Is that a true reflection, probably not. There could have been nobody in the box. Or how many were in the box ? Or are stats sophisticated enough to actually determine a chance created as being X feet within a team mate in the box ? Or what is it. THere would be so many variables to play with.
Did he create the most chances from the left, and % of those from the left converted. Does that mean he's better playing in a certain position.
But I think this is overcomplicating things.
"Assists" may sometimes actually be the more useful stat, precisely because it doesn't need to go into the whys and wherefores so much. If someone is setting up thirty goals a season, they are doing
something right. It could well be that they are playing with a demon of a striker who converts every half chance. But why is it always our man who provides that killer final pass? Isn't it the case that he's making that striker look good just as much?
On the other hand, you have the much more subjective "chances created" stat. To really get any meaning out of this one, you need to examine not just the player you are looking at, but the way his team-mates interact with him. If he is creating lots of "chances" but none of them are going in the net, is it the fault of the striker? Or are the "chances" he provides always half a second too slow, just behind the forward's foot, at chest height or to a player who is actually being marked out of a good opportunity?
That sort of vision and timing is very hard to measure statistically, but will come out obviously through a simpler metric like "assists" - he's doing the job, that's all we really care about.
Take a striker now, he's getting a lot of chances but not scoring many goals. "Chance conversion" seems like a useful stat to me.
But what if the balls he gets are always just behind him, or he gets it when he's being marked by two men, or he's not at a good angle to get a shot off?
Then his positioning and timing is poor, and he'll probably never be a good striker.
For me, the useful stats are the ones which prove themselves.
"Pass completion" doesn't tell you much about a player by itself, but depending on his postion, there's a percentage you don't want to go below. Roughly speaking, this lower-limit percentage reduces as you move away from your own goal, wingers are more likely to lose a ball in an attempt on goal, while a centre-back needs to be absolutely spot on if he's passing inside his own area.
Even the direction of passing isn't much of an indicator, if you look at Barca, there are players in the midfield who play the ball sideways a lot of the time, and backwards just as often. But when it moves forward, the whole team is involved, and an attack can build very quickly. I'm sceptical that a useful, detailed mathematical/statistical model of that is possible. What you can look for, though, is which player tends to successfully make forward passes more often in key parts of the pitch, leaving the sideways/backwards passes for another analysis. Again, there's statistical "noise" around this information, because it depends on the awareness of players higher up the field, but that sort of noise really should fade with a large enough data set. Unless the man in question only ever plays it forward to the same player, in which case he's an idiot and not worth buying.