Did you know...

..that Arsenal have the highest short passes per game in the league? Putting the ball on the ground and passing it around has been central to Arsenal's style of play and this particular stat shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has watched even the odd Arsenal game. Wenger's answer when he was asked what he looks for in a player is unforgettably sparse - a good first touch and a good pass. That is all. (If I were the interviewer my follow up question would have been "Walcott?", but never mind) His belief in building a team with such players shows through in the statistics. At 503 passes per game, Arsenal sit comfortably at the top of EPL, followed by Man City, Swansea and Man Utd. What about the passmasters of La Liga, I hear you La Liga supremacists holler. Surely the El TechincalWizards dwarf the English Ogres when it comes to playing football the way it should be played? Surely?

Combining the teams of La Liga and EPL, quite expectedly, Barca come tops at a mammoth 657 passes per game thereby annoyingly skewing my graph and messing up my y-axis. I have omitted them in the graph to make things more readable (and competitive). Next in line, albeit a distant second, is Arsenal beating some obvious contenders like Madrid, Bilbao and Valencia (who are some way down at 393) very, very comfortably if I may add. What is striking is for all the depictions of the Spanish league as the short ground passing, highly technical, pure footballing league and the EPL as physical brutes plying their Rugby trade in the wrong sport, it is the EPL sides which dominate the top 10 positions. 

I will have to admit I was very surprised to see Liverpool and Chelsea beat a team like Bilbao who are way more exciting to watch the mind-numbing, paint drying style of play of the English sides like Liverpool. So what explain this discrepancy between numbers and experience? Maybe short passes don't measure what we intend to measure, namely the attractive style of passing football that we here like? Or it could be that looking at a single stat in isolation leads to missing the bigger picture and perhaps if we look at short passes along with number of crosses, zones of attacking play, number of touches in zones, shots etc. we will get a more holistic picture. Or maybe whoscored's definition of short is not short enough? Or maybe my experience is wrong? I don't know. All I know is Arsenal top the EPL when it comes to playing some neat, tidy, short passes (and are also third in the league) and that is very faith-reaffirming.


Data from the wonderful www.whoscored.com