Everybody who ever played football themselves will have a favourite teammate, somebody you had a strong chemistry with. Whether you knew already before you started your run that you will receive a pass at the perfect moment or whether you knew defensively at all times where your mate was. There are just certain players you always wanted to play together when teams got selected.

The same is true to some extent for professional football clubs. Some teams are carried by a few amazing players who additionally interact incredibly well with each other. Players that connect more often with each other to create chances together.

This blogpost is trying to touch exactly on that. Looking for the most dangerous offensive duos in European Football.

Approach: xG-Model as Basis

The foundation was laid in the last blog article “Created Value: MVP’s on offense”, in which we looked at how to quantify offensive contribution.

In short, we evaluate each shot with a probability, take that value as a metric for quality of the shot and split it up between involved teammates.

In that analysis we rewarded individual players and only looked at their personal offensive contribution. Here we want to find players who connect often and well with each other. We can do this by simply adding up the created value between teammates, whenever they connected with a pass.

Most dangerous duos in Europe

The great thing is since the approach and methodology were laid out in the last article, we can jump straight to the results and take a peak at the top 5.

Team Name Player 1 Player 2 P1 to P2 P2 to P1 Overall Value Atalanta

Bergamo A. Gómez J. Iličić 2.65 1.64 4.28 FC Barcelona L. Messi L. Suárez 2.58 1.61 4.18 Sevilla FC Pablo Sarabia W. Ben Yedder 1.90 1.79 3.69 Wolverhampton

Wanderers R. Jiménez Diogo Jota 1.33 2.27 3.60 AFC Bournemouth C. Wilson R. Fraser 1.07 2.39 3.45

The most dangerous offensive duo is from feelgood-story and Champions League newcomer Atalanta Bergamo. The strongest offensive team in the past Serie A season (77 goals) heavily depends on Alejandro (Papu) Gómez, who also had the highest created value (see last article) in all of Europe. That was already surprising to me, seeing that his teammate Duván Zapata scored 23 goals while assisting another 7. However when investigating a bit more, it is easy to see why these two are (according to this metric) the most dangerous duo in Europe.

Iličić and Gómez and the rest of the top 5

Overall they’ve been on the pitch together in 28 matches in the last season.

In those 28 games, Atalanta had overall 476 attacks that ended in a shot. In 103 (21%) of these, Gómez and Iličić were both involved, in 326 (68%) at least one of them was involved.

Even though both of them are not as great as a goalscorer as Zapata, they are imminently important to creating the chances for him.

After digging more into the importance of them for Atalanta, I was wondering how the other top duos look like.

Involvements in attacks that led to shots of duos in their club

What Messi & Suárez are for Barcelona, Iličić and Gómez represent for Atalanta. Both duos are heavily involved in creating chances for their teams. Less than 20% of chances occur without at least one player being involved in the build-up play or finish.

The other top 5 duos are also involved in the majority of chances created, but to a lesser extent.

Top 20 in Europe

I’m cheating a bit here. Taking the best duo from each team, I took the top 5 duos from each of the 4 leagues and sorted it by their overall created value.

If I didn’t do it this way, we would probably see more duos from the same club, so please forgive me if there are names missing you might expect.

The following list still gives a great overview who plays well together and additionally gives us insight into the direction of play between to players.

The column P1 to P2 gives us the value created by passes played from player 1 to player 2, with P2 to P1 showing the opposite.

Team

Name Player 1 Player 2 P1 to P2 P2 to P1 Overall

Value Atalanta

Bergamo A. Gómez J. Iličić 2.65 1.64 4.28 FC Barcelona L. Messi L. Suárez 2.58 1.61 4.18 Sevilla FC P. Sarabia Ben Yedder 1.90 1.79 3.69 Wolverhampton Wanderers R. Jiménez Diogo Jota 1.33 2.27 3.60 AFC Bournemouth C. Wilson R. Fraser 1.07 2.39 3.45 Leverkusen K. Havertz J. Brandt 1.46 1.93 3.39 Bayern

München J. Kimmich R.

Lewandowski 2.68 0.60 3.29 Empoli FC R. Krunić F. Caputo 2.05 1.20 3.25 Liverpool FC Mohamed Salah S. Mané 1.85 1.27 3.12 SS Lazio C. Immobile J. Correa 1.78 1.10 2.88 Hoffenheim N. Schulz A. Kramarić 1.68 1.13 2.81 Manchester City FC David Silva R. Sterling 1.61 1.18 2.80 Borussia

Dortmund M. Reus J. Sancho 1.09 1.65 2.74 Eintracht

Frankfurt L. Jović A. Rebić 1.81 0.80 2.61 US Sassuolo Calcio Pol Lirola D. Berardi 1.25 1.34 2.59 Celta Vigo M. Gómez Iago Aspas 1.42 1.15 2.57 Villarreal CF Gerard

Moreno Santi Cazorla 0.79 1.77 2.56 Juventus FC M. Pjanić Cristiano

Ronaldo 1.95 0.51 2.46 Real Madrid K. Benzema L. Modrić 0.51 1.93 2.44 Arsenal FC A. Iwobi Aubameyang 1.68 0.56 2.23

For some duos, like the Sevilla tag-team of Pablo Sarabia and Ben Yedder, the value for setting each other up is almost equally weighted.

For other duos however we see some heavy imbalances.

The strongest (and most understandable) outlier in this category is the best duo of Bayern Munich.

Kimmich connects incredibly often with Lewandowski when creating chances, while the opposite is very seldom true. The same goes for some other duos, including Ronaldo who is profiting a lot of Pjanić or Benzema who is often set up by L. Modrić (while the opposite doesn’t really happen).

While this provides us with some more information about which players are important to a team offensively, we will dive a bit deeper in the next article looking at full offensive networks by the best teams in Europe.