There have been articles saying Manchester United are a long-ball team and others stating they are not, and even more asking ‘but what is a long ball?’ For us at Opta it is all about the context

If Opta had some sort of early warning system, it would have flashed red on Sunday evening as Sam Allardyce talked about “long-ball United” in his post-game interview. A few minutes later came the first of many inquiries about Louis van Gaal’s style of play, a perfect storm of fact, counterfact and Manchester United. The debate continued on Monday and then surged again on Tuesday as Van Gaal arrived at his press conference with a dossier of passing data, asking the media to “copy it and go to Big Sam”.

The overriding feeling when listening to the debate Allardyce started is one of confusion. It is possible right now to go and read articles saying that Manchester United are a long-ball team, others stating they are not a long-ball team, yet more asking ‘but what is a long ball?’ – plus many people on social media adhering to the time-honoured tradition of saying that the only stat that matters is the one in the top left-hand corner.

Surely it should be possible to reach a sensible conclusion. After all, there was only one match between West Ham United and Manchester United on Sunday, only 25 players who featured, only 764 passes and only 143 of those were long. The bare essentials are these: West Ham played 53 long passes against Van Gaal’s team while the visitors made 37 more. So that’s settled, Allardyce was right, United are a long-ball team.

But wait, as the Prozone data Van Gaal used in his dossier on Tuesday showed, West Ham played a higher number of long passes forward (Opta recorded the figures as 45 for the home team, 40 for the visitors) than Manchester United.

And it’s the pass knocked forward that is the collective image of the so-called long-ball game. You know the scene: cold midweek nights where the ball is hung up speculatively for a big man, while a smaller partner feeds off scraps. West Ham, with 85% of their long passes forward on Sunday, seem to fit that archetype more than United, with their figure of 44%, yet anyone who watched the game will know that most of West Ham’s play throughout the game was incisive and far from the hit-and-hope football of lore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Louis van Gaal pulls out a stats pamphlet at his press conference.

Context is key here, and this is something Opta try to provide, both in how we collect data and what we supply to the outside world. On Monday Danny Higginbotham lamented on Twitter that there is a vast difference between someone like Andrea Pirlo playing a precise long pass and an agricultural launch forward. We agree and separate those two things out. In the Opta world a long pass (35 yards and over if you were wondering) is one aimed to a specific player (think Pirlo), while a long ball is one played into a specific zone (think “hit the channels”).

Applying this to the Premier League we see that Van Gaal’s men are second for long passes behind Burnley. That particular ranking has been seen a lot in recent days but Manchester United are still Manchester United and unsurprisingly they make many more passes than Burnley; over 4,000 more heading into the midweek fixtures. A more sensible way of ranking the teams would be to look at the proportion of their passes that are long. This pushes United down to 13th place with a rate of 14%, still higher than the likes of Manchester City (8%), Arsenal (9%), Chelsea and Liverpool (both 11%) but, proportionally, the teams using the long pass are such sides as Crystal Palace, Burnley, QPR, Leicester and, in fifth place, West Ham.

Even if we go back to perhaps the last truly vintage Manchester United team, the title winners of 2007-08, we can see that United’s long pass proportion is around 13%, so roughly the same. Now this was seven years ago but it is hard to recall the often devastatingly direct 4-6-0 lineup including Cristiano Ronaldo, Carlos Tevez and Wayne Rooney being singled out for aesthetic criticism.

Looking at long balls, United are again 13th in the division this season and perhaps most tellingly they are 15th when it comes to aerial duels in the attacking half. Not the most elegant sounding category but if you play long-ball football you’ll be racking lots of these up every game; Manchester United are not. The passing category that they do top, however, is proportion of passes played sideways, with 56% of their balls heading left or right, and it is this that feels like it gets to the heart of why the team have not been at their best in recent weeks.

As Van Gaal pointed out in his press conference, United’s high possession figures aren’t achieved by playing long-ball football. What the data shows instead is a relative lack of penetration, and sometimes the best remedy for that is to hit it long, as United did in the closing stages of Sunday’s game. The result has been a debate to rival the one almost exactly a year ago when David Moyes’s team hit an astonishing 81 crosses in their home game against Fulham. All we can do is wait and see what February 2016 will bring.

Duncan Alexander is head of UK content & media at Opta