Translating Possession in Football

Sidetracking from the previous two post about Sevilla's Europa League triumphs, I long wanted to discuss about the translation of possession.

The notion of possession has been a hot topic in contemporary football with the rise of Barcelona's tiki-taka play - strings of short passes and rapid off-the-ball movements. In this school of thought, the higher level of possession (time and the number of touches) entails a lesser time on the ball for the opponent. In this regard, when one mention that the ball is round, I'm pretty sure he meant possession since it is the only 50-50 index.

Despite the obsession of keeping possession, there are some teams that excel without it. Just recently, Leicester City - the new Premier League Champions - are kings without much touches on the ball. Their 'miracle' transition from a hopeless team destined for relegation to becoming champion the next season is an interesting case study worth exploring. Based on the data on squawka.com, the Foxes has an average possession rate of 46% per match. Hence, this disprove that you don't really need a large bowl of possession to win and be successful.

Yet back to the idea of 'the translation of possession', it is a very simple concept to understand with many implications.

In a nutshell, a team with possession equates to the man with the ball (duh!); this ball carrier can only execute this array of subsequent actions in any given time (range from 0 seconds to last minute of the game):

1) move with the ball (dribble, run)

2) pass the ball (long, short, through ball, head, miss-pass)

3) shoot (off or on target).

Really, there isn't much other actions you can do.

Other than the clever tactics to waste time or to lure your opponent, the end point of possession is to score a goal. In light of this, many statisticians and football pundits tend to focus narrowly on several areas such as the number of passes to a goal, the area of passes distributed, the off-the-ball movement, etc. While these areas are vital in attributing to the goal, I feel that possession is nevertheless associated with the attempts (chance created), which is then split into two subsets - shot on target and shot off target; then former is concomitant to a goal.

With that said, the translation of possession is shown in the picture below.

In this simple flow, the translation of possession into attempts is critical in attributing to a goal. As mentioned above, a ball-carrier can only execute a fixed sets of actions and all of which must be for the purpose of creating an goal attempt. In this regard, no attempts implies no shot on target and no goal. Thus, the the focus in this concept is regarding the first two left circles.

Other than the binary of having possession and the lack of it, the possession of a team can theoretically range from a mere 0% to 100%; however with the laws of turnover in possession and with simple Nash equilibrium theories (where opposing teams know each other's dominant strategies), the normalcy tends to lies between 50:50 to 30:70 ratio. In this sense, there is a binary established - one team tend to have a higher level of possession than the other - besides the exception of a 50:50 ratio.

To elaborate further, regardless if a team have a higher or lower level of possession, the team's ability to translate to goal attempts is important and very much dependent on their dominant strategies (long balls, short passes, etc). To get a sniff of such strategies, one can analyze the average length of passes and the time to create a goal scoring chance (off or on target). For instance the average pass length of Leicester City is 20m. In light of their disdain of possession, one can easily suspect a counterattack tactic in their dominant strategies which are based on their strong defensive prowess and fast forward players.

(P.S There is no right or wrong way to play football. The aesthetics of playing beautiful football is a social construct in many ways.)

This is as opposed to a team with a lot of possession. Team like Bayern Munich and Barcelona, they have very skillful technical players who are able to keep the ball well which is one of the many reasons of their high level of possession in most games. Still, sometimes having a wealth of possession does not translate to a win despite starving your opponent of possession.

Thus there is a need to covert the possession into attempts; this is the first move. With that said, the focus should then be on the attempt: possession ratio; the higher the ratio, the better chances a team have in converting a goal from their attempts. In the concept of the translation of possession, the study of the 4 bubbles will require 3 different ratio which is basically the 'the right bubble/ the left bubble'. I feel that this flow is currently worth studying and is associated to many statistical theory such as the graph theory (e.g. finding the fastest way to goal).

In short, this flow explains the simple idea of how football possession works especially in getting a goal. However, I would like to point out several flaws in this line of thought:

1) A team with higher possession can play a diverse style of play ranging from long ball or short ball. This means that they have a greater creativity and more routes to goal creations as opposed to a team with lesser possession. With that said, the higher number of attempts would imply a higher chance of a short on target and consequently a goal.

2) Not every team with lesser possession play a counterattack tactic like Leicester. Imagine a match up between Arsenal and Barcelona, one of the team definitely would tend to have a relatively lower possession rate. Thus, it really depends on the dominant strategies of a team; if their key strengths do not justify a goal or victory, a plan B or C would be put into place. Even so, the timing of possession and timing of a goal chance is worth exploring in a team's success.

Alright. My alarm has rang and it is back to the grind. Till next time. Cheers. Thanks for reading! :)