Tuesday, June 26, 2018

17-18 Usage Rates


Finally got around to updating Usage Rates for the 2017-18 Premier League season. A couple notes:

1) Since Squawka's website has been pretty useless for a while, I used data from Whoscored. This means I went ahead and added dispossessions to the calculation.
2) The two sites appear to count goalkeeper passes quite differently, with Whoscored seeming to include a lot more of them (I assume this is because Squawka only included short passes, but I'm unsure about that).

While the above changes mean the calculation is more accurate, it does make historical comparisons more difficult.

For those unfamiliar with the general concept, I've written about the metric here, here, and here. Usage Rate is an attempt to measure the influence each player has in a team's attack by looking at the percentage of a team's possessions he "uses", or has the final action of a possession, weighted by minutes played:

(Shots+Key Passes+Assists+Unsuccessful Take-Ons+Unsuccessful Passes+Dispossessions)/
((Team Shots+Team UTO+Team UP+Team Dispossessions)/(Minutes Played/Total Minutes))

Thoughts/suggestions/comments are all welcome.

Link is here.