What would be good to try and do is forget about the pitch and analyze the relationships between any given player and the nearest half-dozen players (his own and the opposition). I started sketching this out after QPR. I called them 'Downing diagrams' because he was the player who fascinated me most during that game. Some people thought he had a good game but what was evident and what happened very time he was in the attacking third and being closed down, was that he offloaded. He always looked to pass or stopped to think ad lost the ball.
the italians have drilled their players this way for decades - depending where the ball is thats where you should be - if it in zone xy then you need to be in zone ab, if you are in ab then the ext player has to be in bc etc.
Lobonovsky had taken it a step further earlier implying that any rigid application of a system is probably flawed......which turns into the old level 3 football thread and where the hell do we go from there -
however 'Downing diagrams' would depend not only on your own team's relationships but those of the opponents and players are increasingly encouraged to have game intelligence which means they can adapt to circumstances meaning anomalies could be either productive decisions or mistakes and you would need to place them in context - it all becomes very messy not to say it can't be modelled but the greater depth of detail the greater the level of inaccuracy
what we need to do is use our eyes but at the same time remove the bias - use stats to give pause for thought - identify patterns - identify significant moments - the sophistication of the models and stats required are very difficult for me to imagine - which brings us back to football being a simple game complicated by idiots
the idea of 'chance creation' as a key metric has interested me for a while however it requires definition and context -
and as we've found - if you make it an objective be careful what you wish for because we've created oodles of chances (which is one of the criteria we used to select the players allegedly) so that worked - its an old adage that any system will change to support the metrics gathered - unfortunately you dont win games on chances created - we could easily argue the next link in the chain is to buy players with high chance conversion ratings and we are home and hosed once we find the right balance.........which brings you back to having to find players that compliment each other not plucking them at random because of their stats -