I understand and agree with your points and to many I think they will be self evident. The examples I used were to further support the point I'm trying to make, which is why I brought it up.brap2 wrote: Sun Oct 18, 2026 9:40 am Illustrative of progressing between lines?
CBS and deeper midfielders will profile better than am and 10s because of their position on the pitch and you are expected to exercise some understanding of that when looking at the graph.
Cherki and Pascal Gross constantly find players in the box, but aren’t progressing through the lines all the time because they themselves are usually high end receivers.
Someone like James garner has an outstanding pass completion but is below average for progressive - so he’s safe but compared to the league he’s not very adventurous despite us probably needing him to because he’s usually our deepest midfielder.
The 'CBs breaking lines' example was to emphasise the point that, not only is this such an incredibly tiny sample size for which no conclusions should be drawn, that it's also weakened further (and ultimately not that important a representation) when other positions, other formations other setups in the 20 club league all have numerous and different reasons to be excluded.
It was a already a weak product - and yet more and more data, from a very limited pool, is having to be filtered out by the reader, post publication.
Is it anything beyond click bait?
It's almost as if they're saying "hey look at how we can slice the numbers, arent we professional, reliable and insightful and good at it?", whilst at the same time making no claims, implying "draw your own conclusions" throwing in a standard disclaimer, and also upon any criticism having the standard response at the ready "oh but we said don't take too much from it".
It's the sort of stuff that does a disservice to credible statistical analysis.
It's really lazy, and hopefully if readers have enough about them to understand what these analysts think they're trying to put forward, also have enough about them to say well there's actually very little we can take from this.
Drastically insufficient data (at most 270 mins of football!), and pretty poor methodology.
