December 18 – A data analysis of MVPs in clubs in Europe’s Big 5 leagues for the season to date shows Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk and Barcelona’s Lionel Messi as again being their clubs key players so far. But the lists also throw up some less well known names.
The CIES Football Observatory has developed an algorithm using performance data provided by OptaPro. The data looks at the MVP per big-5 league club, as well as the top values for each of the six areas of the game analysed. To be ranked players had to have played at least nine matches intotal including six full domestic league matches.
“The MVPs are footballers whose performance had the biggest influence in their teams’ results,” says the report.
“We notably find Marco Verratti at Paris St-Germain, Lionel Messi at Barcelona, Toni Kroos at Real Madrid, Kevin de Bruyne at Manchester City, Virgil van Dijk at Liverpool, Crio Immobile at Lazio, Jamie Vardy at Leicester City, Dimitri Payet at Olympique Marseille, Miralem Panic at Juventus, Sven Bender at Bayer Leverkusen and Milan Skriniar at Inter.”
“At Real Madrid, five different footballers head the tables per area of the game: Raphael Varane for rigour (duels), Carlos Casemiro for recovery (interceptions), Toni Kroos for distribution (passes), Eden Hazard for take on (dribbles) and Karim Benzema for both chance creation (assists) and shooting (attempts). At Barcelona, three players only top the rankings: Lionel Messi for all of the attacking indicators, Clement Lenglet for rigour and Sergio Busquets for both recovery and distribution.”
See the full stats at https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2019/wp278/en/
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