Lots of talk in the aftermath of Arsenal's defeat at Camp Nou has centered on the Gunners' inability to generate any meaningful chances. Perhaps Arsena's 0 shots inside Barcelona's 18 are unusual, but guess what? Arsenal aren't alone. Barcelona's performance this year and last has been astonishing, and you don't need to know numbers to understand this; all you need to do is watch Messi & Co in action. It's beautiful and suffocating at the same time.
It's hard to think about how one could use publicly available information to put a number on what it takes to beat Barca. Soccermetrics based on box scores are great for generating insights about events that occur often (when the sample size is relatively large) and about things that everyone can see (like goals, match outcomes, shots, and fouls, for instance). But Barca defeats are such rare events, and the kind of information we have is so limited, that it may just be better to just watch and enjoy rather than to apply soccermetrics based on things like box scores.
But I can't help myself, so here is my Saturday morning back of the envelope analysis of Barca defeats.
Let's start with the basics. How rare are Barca defeats? By the end of February, Barca had lost exactly one match in La Liga - or 4.17% of the matches they've played. During the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons combined, they lost a total of 6 league matches, or 7.89% of the time. Face it, Barca losing a match is just not something that happens with enough frequency for us to get a solid handle on. In the one match they lost this season, their opponents were able to get 9 shots off. In the two matches they have tied this year, Barca's opponents managed 7 and 11 shots, exactly 1 and 2 of which, respectively, were actually on target. And in the matches they have won (the vast majority of times), opponents were able to shoot in the direction of Valdés' goal only an average of 6.5 times, with an accurate shot number of 2.76. Those are astonishing numbers.
You won't be surprised to hear that these numbers are, soccermetrically speaking, literally off the charts. So what makes the difference between the matches they have won and the ones they have lost? Because Barcelona losing is such a rare event, it's important to increase the sample size. So I went back to the prior two seasons to see if there are any patterns in Barcelona wins, draws, and defeats. First I thought that, perhaps, you have to be super aggressive to intimidate them physically. So maybe fouls against Barcelona (or Barcelona exacting retribution with fouls) would be correlated with Barca wins and losses. Take a look.
Clearly, that's not what it is. Barca's opponents typically foul more than Barca do (or are called more for fouls), but there is no difference between matches the team lost, drew, or won.
The one other indicator I thought would be interesting to look at is shots because we can think of them as an indicator of midfield and offensive production - you need to move the ball up the field into position in order to get a shot off. So we can think of it as a rough and ready proxy for a team's ability to create something in the opponent's half. So here's the equivalent graph for shots for and against in Barca matches in the past two seasons.
Now we're getting somewhere. Barca's offense is clearly very consistent across types of match outcomes when it comes to generating shots; generally speaking, they manage around 15+ shots on their opponents' goal. But while their offense has performed as well in the matches they have lost as they have when the team won, they have allowed their opponents to take twice as many shots in the matches they lost. So Messi, Iniesta, Villa, & Co have consistently produced the same offensive display match after match; but they have been more inconsistent with the back to their own goal.
So how would we know whether this really matters, once we control for other factors that go into match outcomes? So here's one final piece of evidence: I estimated a logistic regression where the outcome to be explained was a Barcelona loss. I controlled for fouls, home field advantage, and whether Barca is ahead at the half (it matters a lot, by the way), but also included the number of shots for and against. The only two variables that achieved statistical significance were Barca being ahead at halftime - when they're behind they're much more likely to lose - and shots by their opponents. But this doesn't mean you're highly likely to win if you take 15 shots rather than 5. To get a sense of how hard it is to beat them, the regressions tell us that, based on shots alone (and this is a big condition of course), you'd have to take an otherwordly 45 shots to generate predicted odds of a Barca loss of 50%. If you played at home and were tied at halftime, you'd still have to take 35 shots. And if you played at home and were ahead by one goal at the half, you'd still have to take 26 shots to get to 51% odds of a Barca loss.
Of course, these are just fictitious examples based on very rough and incomplete data, but they should give you a sense that beating Barcelona is a herculean task. If there is one lesson from this little soccermetric exercise, it's that you can't sit back to beat them (unless perhaps you're ahead at the half). Instead, you have to find a way to get the ball into Barcelona's half. I suspect the best way to do that is not to try and pass it there; instead, you may want to give Sam Allardyce a call to see how you could best emulate his old Bolton strategy of playing long ball.
But to really figure it out, you need to watch lots of tape and have the kind of detailed data managers and clubs have access to (the kind provided by Prozone, Opta, and the like), so that you can dissect Barca's weaknesses based on lots of observations of smaller events (passes, runs, dead ball situations, etc.). What soccermetricians can do based on the information available to all is similar to observing lots of patients and telling you what ails the average patient; but for rare events like Barca defeats, it takes a really experienced doctor who's willing to spend lots of time with individual patients to diagnose that rare illness.
In the meantime, forget the numbers and just watch the beautiful Barca game unfold. The one thing I do know is that it's an amazing outlier.
How have the Germans done it? Turns out, there is no such thing as an overnight success. As a story in German papers revealed yesterday, it's been 10 years since the 36 clubs of the 1. and 2. Bundesliga (Germany's top two divisions) decided to require clubs to operate a youth academy if they wanted to be licensed. And so far, the academy systems has been a success. Currently, 5,400 young players are playing in the academies, and 19 of 22 players currently in Germany's national team were trained in one of the academies.
