Packing: The most important football statistic you’ve never heard of? Possession, passes completed, shots on target, corners – just a few statistics so often presented on TV, online, in your […]

Possession, passes completed, shots on target, corners – just a few statistics so often presented on TV, online, in your newspaper, in your betting app or wherever when it comes to football, let alone during this World Cup.

This was “weird” but also “kind of the starting point,” former Bayer Leverkusen and Germany midfielder Stefan Reinartz tells i, because “these statistics have almost no correlation to the end result”.

If you had been watching Euro 2016 on German TV, you would have heard about Packing, a statistic developed by the then freshly retired Reinartz as he transitioned into the world of statistics as managing director and co-founder of Impect.

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You have to go back a further two years to its genesis. Having been on the panel at the Sports University in Cologne for a talk, he asked one professor: “[Does it make] sense that pass completion has any significance to winning a game? Because I could play the ball back to my goalkeeper 100 times and have a perfect ratio.”

It made him realise: “It’s ultimately about retaining possession whilst getting past the opponents. The opponent is our problem and to solve it, I want to get past the opponent with the ball.”

Influence

Based in Cologne, Reinartz and Impect focus mostly on providing data to clubs as opposed to supplying media. Coaches such as Domenico Tedesco, who finished second with Schalke last season in Germany, and new PSG coach Thomas Tuchel, both use it in their team and opponent analyses.

As Reinartz explains, Packing measures each time a forward pass or dribble is completed before, crucially, counting up how many opponents have been taken out or bypassed in the process.

As an example, John Stones were to find Harry Kane with a forward pass against Sweden which Kane controlled successfully and that pass took out eight outfield opponents both Stones, as the player of the pass, and Kane, having received it, get a point for every player that was bypassed in the process.

To the England team’s overall tally of bypassed opponents eight would be added too.

Impect’s work shows that teams who on average have a higher packing rate than their opponents in a game are expected to win between 30-40 per cent of the time.

If you specifically look at defenders bypassed the likelihood of victory jumps to 60 per cent – something that no traditional statistic can rival, apart from goals scored of course.

Eight of the teams making up the top nine in ‘net bypassed defenders’ for the World Cup group stages qualified for the last 16. That tells you something more about the correlation already but then consider that all those eight teams qualified without exception for the quarter-finals.

Belgium lead the way

Russia, Croatia and England did all win on penalties but Reinartz’s fellow managing director at Impect, Lukas Keppler, emphasises that they are looking for “way more than just the two numbers of bypassed opponents and defenders”.

“We are also evaluating the interceptions or ‘turnover’ of each player, as well as the abilities as a pass receiver. We try to provide the most accurate analysis of a performance, but of course, we cannot measure everything, For example, how good is the mental strength or mentality of a player? That is something which is hard to evaluate objectively.”

The “bypassed defenders” statistic though has certainly given a very good indication at the tournament in Russia of who is more likely to win.

Of the 56 games at the tournament so far in Russia, 12 have been drawn. From those remaining 44 games, only four were won by the team who bypassed fewer defenders i.e. in games with a result, the team who bypassed more defenders won 91 per cent of the time.

The importance in that jump between bypassing defenders and bypassing opponents can be seen in how Germany’s Jerome Boateng and Toni Kroos are first and second in the tournament standings for the opponents category but are not in the top five when it comes to taking out defenders, led by Belgium’s Dries Mertens and Thomas Meunier.

Similarly, Neymar tops the statistic when it comes to just receiving the ball but isn’t in the top five when it comes to doing so behind defenders, with Michy Batshuayi on top.

One of the points with Packing then? Where you play and receive the ball is vital.

England fans might be worried that Sweden’s defence has been bypassed the least but Keppler notes that Gareth Southgate’s defence has also been one of the best in the tournament in this regard.

Packing in the Premier League

England and more specifically the Premier League is a particular point of interest for Keppler. Next season, they will be working with data from the Premier League and the Championship for the first time and, as a result, teams in England with co-founder Jens Hegeler playing for Bristol City.

Even though they currently work with 10 Bundesliga outfits, Reinartz says that pitching to England is easier than in Germany. Impect are already in talks with two unnamed top six Premier League clubs.

“In England, there’s much, much more data orientated work being done. That’s an advantage for us because in Germany we don’t just have to present our product, we have to show that we have the ability to process the data in the first place.”

Does Packing ‘explain’ football?

The launch in Germany back in June 2016 caused a decent amount of hype, spearheaded by TV pundit and ex-Bayern midfielder Mehmet Scholl being particularly enthusiastic. But the binary manner in which it was put across didn’t help, according to Reinartz.

“The expectations were too big and the expectations were too big when Mehmet Scholl immediately said: ‘That explains football.’

“It explains a lot to do with football but when someone says: ‘Hey. We’ve got it! Now that is the truth!’ You can understand the reaction that people say: ‘Ah. It doesn’t explain everything,’” says Reinartz.

“That is automatically more negative than when you say: ‘Hey, look, this is something which is very interesting. It’s something which you can use for a lot of things.'”

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