May 18 – The Barcelona trio of Messi, Neymar and Suarez fill three of the top four best performing big-5 league strikers, according to the CIES Football Observatory. The surprise is that Suarez, who has had a storming goalscoring end to the season is the fourth ranked striker.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Paris St Germain) is in third place while Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) is just sixth best. The highest performing Premier League player in the top 10 is Arsenal’s Alexis Sanchez at tenth.
But Premier League players perform much better in the attacking midfielders category with six in the top ten coming from English clubs – Manchester City’s David Silva beats Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil for the top position.
Of the six English-based players in the top 10 only Adam Lallana is eligible for the country at the Euros.
CIES has been working through the leading players by position in Europe’s big-5 leagues and says the ranking is “particularly useful to unveil the potential of relatively unknown footballers”.
The rankings are established according to six Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For forwards the criteria is weighted more heavily towards chance creation and shooting.
For the full technical analysis of player performance go to http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/mr/mr15/en/
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