Every sport needs a currency, some basic stat to keep track of the important stuff that happens along the way to scoring and winning. A good currency should be easy to count and have an obvious relationship to the point of the game.
Baseball’s currency is … (points to a nervous Jonah Hill) … getting on base.
American football uses yards, a straightforward measurement of how far a team moves the ball towards the end of the field, where scoring happens.
For most of its history, association football only bothered to track what happens at the end of a play: goals and, eventually, shots and assists. That kind of currency works pretty well in basketball, where everyone is shooting all the time and teams score over 100 points, but not so well in a sport where only a few players take the shots and your team might score twice on a good day.
In the last few years, finally, a more useful type of football stat has started to catch on: progressive passes, carries and receptions.
Like American football’s yards, these measure the ball’s progress away from your goal and towards the other team’s, which is the basic idea behind all invasion sports.
Progressive actions are not advanced metrics. You can see them with your eyes instead of a statistical model. If you got bored enough, you could sit in the stadium and tally them up with a Sharpie on some accommodating seat-mate’s bald head. But simple as they are, progressive actions are fundamental to how the game works and can give you a pretty good idea of which teams and players are good at it.
Ball progression stats are football’s natural currency — our sport’s underappreciated version of yards or bases.
One problem with making them part of football’s standard lexicon is that the meaning of “progressive” can be slippery. A progressive pass on Wyscout isn’t quite the same as one on fbref.comwith new definitions proliferating like the dozen different charging cables you keep tangled in a drawer somewhere. All the definitions agree on just one thing: a progressive action advances the ball somehow.
At The Athleticwe count a completed pass as “progressive” if it’s at least 10 metres (11 yards) long and moves the ball at least 25 per cent of the remaining distance to goal.
This definition has a few advantages.
By using the distance gained toward the centre of the opposition goal instead of vertical distance toward the goal line, we’re less likely to count an unhelpful pass toward the corner flag as progressive and more likely to reward a diagonal or sideways one that moves the ball into a better shooting position. Even a cutback that travels away from the goal line to a player in front of the penalty spot could be progressive.
The point of measuring progressive actions by a percentage instead of some fixed number of metres/yards is that it scales naturally as the ball moves up and down the pitch.
When Virgil van Dijk plays a progressive pass that gains 25 per cent of the remaining distance to goal from the defensive third, it has to travel a lot farther than one by Bruno Fernandes that gains 25 per cent of a much smaller remaining distance from the top of the box, even though both passes are progressive by the same definition.
Thanks to the scalable 25 per cent rule, players in different positions have roughly comparable opportunities to play progressive passes through the lines as defences expand to press high and contract to protect their goal. See how the very different passes by Van Dijk and Fernandes in the examples above each break a line of defence and take four opponents out of the play?
There’s a reason that lists of top progressive passers tend to look a lot like the leaderboards for disruption metrics such as line-breaking passes or “packing,” which counts bypassed defenders: making progress towards goal means beating the defence.
That relationship with breaking lines is the main reason for setting the bar for progressive passes at 25 per cent. It’s not really true that a pass that travels 25 per cent of the way to goal is the same as five passes that each advance five per cent, because short passes played in front of the lines allow the defence to adjust. We only want to count dangerous passes that make the opposition scramble.
But enough talk. Let’s see some numbers.
The list of top progressive passers is heavy on centre-backs, mostly because centre-backs play more passes than everyone else. But the top of the list also features a central attacking midfielder, a right-back who sometimes plays in defensive midfield and a goalkeeper.
If we look at the kinds of progressive passes these players complete, we see a variety of long balls and diagonals out from the back, line-breaking passes in the centre of the pitch and crosses and through balls into the box. There are clearly a lot of ways to advance the ball and disrupt a defence.
Another way to visualise progressive passing leaders is by zone, counting up who does the most ball progression from each part of the pitch.
Van Dijk and Rodri show up in the exact zones you’d expect them to. So do Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard, running their little exchanges at the corner of the penalty area for Arsenal. The biggest surprise might be Jordan Pickford, who is England’s leading progressive passer not only in his own box but also in front of it — in open play! — thanks to the miracles of Dycheball.
We tend to think of ball progression as something the player on the ball does, but the receiver is just as important — without good movement off the ball, there’d be nobody to pass to. If we count up progressive passes by who gets on the end of them, we get progressive receptions, another useful stat.
Here, the leaderboard is mostly strikers, who spend pretty much all their time finding room to receive progressive passes.
If you’re Luton Town’s Carlton Morris, that means a lot of target-man work, just trying to help your team get out of their half. If you’re Erling Haaland, you’re crunching centre-backs into scrap metal to finish progressive passes in front of goal (if you think about it, expected goals is basically another kind of progressive receiving stat). For a guy like Ollie Watkins, who’s heavily involved in both the build-up and the opposition box, the progressive reception numbers are off the charts.
The third and last kind of progressive action is carries, and here we use a different threshold — just 15 per cent of the remaining distance to goal rather than 25.
Unlike with passes, it’s almost impossible by definition for a ball-carrier to break lines without taking on and beating somebody on the dribble first (which ends the carry). To disrupt the defence with a carry, then, you only need to advance far enough to attract defenders to the ball, which is what the 15 per cent threshold is meant to approximate.
The progressive carry leaders are mostly wingers, because 15 per cent of the distance to goal isn’t very far when you’re in the final third and a lot of defenders would rather sit off players like Alejandro Garnacho and Jeremy Doku than go in for a tackle too early and get embarrassed. But there are a few centre-backs and defensive midfielders here, too, suggesting how important it is even in a passing attack like Manchester City’s or Arsenal’s to have players at the back who can draw pressure and rearrange the defence before finding the free man.
On the pitch map, Doku and Saka dominate the wings but it’s Pau Torres who owns nearly the entire left half-space. Also notice Antonee Robinson’s importance to Fulham on the left flank, where he leads the league in progressive carries as well as progressive passes, and the peculiar inversion where Rodri does the most progressive carrying in front of the City box but Ruben Dias leads in the two zones in front of him.
When you put it all together, you get a leaderboard that reflects the many different ways players can help their team move the ball up the pitch.
Unlike shot-based stats, which give all the glory to the goalscorers, progressive actions can help capture the importance of unsung heroes like Pascal Gross, an all-purpose ball progressor his Brighton & Hove Albion head coach Roberto De Zerbi has called “one of the best players I’ve had in my career” because “he can play everywhere on the pitch”.
Is that a definitive ranking of the best players in the Premier League? Of course not. But it’s a pretty respectable list for a very basic stat that contains no information about goals, shots, completion rates, turnovers, off-ball positioning or defence of any kind. That’s what a good sports currency should do.
Progressive actions are easy to understand. They credit players at every position, not just the guys in the opposition box. They’re intrinsically related to the nature of the game, which is all about moving the ball away from your goal and toward the other team’s, so it’s not too surprising that they tend to reward good footballers.
What makes a player good at football? More than anything else, it’s that … (points at Jonah Hill again) … they progress the ball.
(Photo of Martin Odegaard: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
2024-05-04 16:09:57
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