November 22 – Manchester City dominate the stats charts in the expanded Performance Atlas released by the CIES Football Observatory.
The measurement tool examines pitch statistics at team level for 35 national competitions across Europe: 30 top divisions and 5 second divisions. The indicators cover all of the three key areas of the game: defence, passing and attack.
The data shows that even in Europe’s Big 5 leagues, where a greater level of competitiveness between teams might be expected, the biggest clubs are still dominant and generally rank higher than the so-called smaller leagues where it could be expected that it would be easier for a single well-funded team to dominate.
Manchester City are notable for their appearance on the leaderboards of all the stats meaurements, leading the table of passes made in the oppositions third, ahead of Chelsea, though Chelsea (89.9%) lead Man City on the number of accurate passes.
When it comes to shots on target Man City are just behind fourth placed Barcelona in a ranking led by Dutch sides Ajax and PSV. But defensively Man City are way ahead of other big clubs in Europe, ranked second behind Dinamo Zagreb for conceding the least shots on target per domestic league game so far this season (1.6).
No club surveyed conceded as few passes in the own third of the pitch as Shakhtar Donetsk (40.8).
View the full Perfomance Atlas at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/atlasperf/en/.
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