March 3 – Goals win matches, but you have to create the chances. Lionel Messi tops a ranking of players who create ‘big’ chances, making a significant goal opportunity every 90 minutes, according to data from the CIES Football Observatory looking at Europe’s Big 5 leagues.
Looking at a three-year spread of data, Messi seems to be improving with age, with the stats showing that not only does he top the rankings over three and five year spreads, but in the last year he has increased his frequency of creating ‘big’ chances to every 87 minutes.
Looking at the data for the past year only, there are “three other players who have created at least one big chance every 90 minutes: Thomas Müller (every 72 minutes), Ángel Di María (82 minutes) and Kevin de Bruyne (every 87 minutes). This is the fab four for chance creation!” says the CIES report.
Looking at the three-year data by league, the Premier League and France’s Ligue1 have the most players in the list with five each, LaLiga has four players, while Serie A and Bundesliga have three each. The three Bundesliga players are all at Bayern Munich.
See the full data at https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2019/wp285/en/
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