Tottenham are getting into dangerous situations. They’re just not turning them into danger. The charts in this excellent analysis by @BassTunedToRed make the problem very clear: • 46 completed take-ons — most in the PL → only 5 ended in a shot or chance created • 34 high turnovers — 4th-most → only 2 ended in a shot (5.9% vs 19.9% league average) • 119 touches in the opposition box → 3.97 touches per box shot — highest in the league The charts are a great reminder that volume metrics need context. Getting into dangerous areas ≠ creating danger. Source: The Guardian / Andrew Beasley Link to the news in comments

Football metrics are not equally repeatable. A player can rank highly in one metric this season and be likely to do so again next year. In another metric, the same ranking may contain much more noise. A new preprint analysed 8,207 player-season pairs across the Big Five to see which metrics persist from one season to the next. For forwards: Progressive carries: 0.733 Progressive passes: 0.709 xG: 0.664 Goals: 0.593 Assists: 0.428 Defensive volume was even less stable: Interceptions: 0.476 Tackles won: 0.414 Blocks: 0.399 But stability is not the same as quality. Pass completion was the most stable metric for midfielders and defenders (0.824), but that persistence can also reflect role, team style and context. This matters when reading player profiles. A radar gives every axis similar visual weight, while the underlying metrics may have very different levels of persistence. For FBPlot, that raises an interesting question: can a player profile show not only what happened, but also how much confidence we should place in each part of it? Thanks to Mohammad Arshan Shaikh for sending this over. I previously wrote about another of his papers on cross-league player projection. Paper: Mohammad Arshan Shaikh, Year-to-Year Metric Stability in Elite Football: A Positional Analysis Across the Big Five European Leagues.

The most useful moment in scouting might be when the data disagrees with what you saw. At CSKA 1948 Sofia, they don’t solve that by choosing data over the eye test. They go back to the video. That disagreement becomes the start of a better scouting loop. ↓↓↓

Data doesn’t replace observation. Observation doesn’t make data unnecessary. They answer different questions. The useful loop is: observe → measure → challenge → rewatch → understand That feels like a much better definition of data-driven scouting. Not fewer scouts. Better questions.

Stop treating every completed pass as equally valuable. A lot of passing analysis still rewards volume: - more completed passes = more influence -more connections = greater importance Useful, but incomplete. 10 safe CB-to-CB passes can dominate a conventional passing network. 3 line-breaking passes that move the ball into dangerous areas may matter far more. A 2026 paper tackles this with a Valued Passing Network (VPN). Instead of weighting connections only by frequency, it weights them by the Expected Threat (xT) they create. So the question changes from: “Who passed to whom the most?” to: “Which passing relationships actually generated threat?” Using the 2022 World Cup, the authors compared conventional passing networks with xT-weighted ones. The valued network showed stronger relationships with player ratings, particularly for midfielders and forwards. The figures make the distinction clear. A conventional network is good at showing structure and circulation. A valued network highlights which connections actually increase attacking threat. That helps separate: - volume from impact - involvement from contribution - circulation from progression - safe possession from threat creation And the World Cup final example is especially interesting: some players who look central in the conventional network become less prominent once passing value is considered, while players such as Messi, Mbappé and Griezmann gain relative importance. This doesn’t mean safe or backwards passes are bad. They can be tactically essential. It means that a completed pass is not automatically a valuable pass. For scouting, that leads to better questions: - Which midfielders generate value rather than simply accumulate touches? - Which player combinations consistently move possession into dangerous states? - Who looks average by passing volume but becomes important when contribution is considered? Pass volume ≠ pass value. A player can be central to circulation without being central to threat creation. Ideally, we should measure both.