Who's the most reliable ball playing centerback in Serie A?

What I’ve done is quite simple, I’ve read this beautiful article from Statsbomb regarding the expected passes model, and replicated what they have done with the data I have.

So I created my expected passes model and done the calculations to have this splendid leaderboard:

I’m pretty happy to see Pavard and Lucumí on top, I have some reservations on names like Izzo, Thiaw and Acerbi, but I think they are pretty much all good names since we are talking about all centerbacks that played for ball dominant teams, and again the model prized Pavard, Casale, Romagnoli and Lucumí between the best.

Looking also at their distribution between all the centerbacks that played at least 1200 minutes we can see that there are quite a lot of good passers between this list, and also that Pavard is the best because he played more difficult passes with a quite high completion percentage. (On another note only Pavard with his 8.4 passes above expectations would be in the top 10 from the top 5 leagues - if I remember correctly)

I decided in the end to do another little thing, since I think Lucumí is a really good centerback which should be more sought after in the market. I’ve compared the passing performance between the Colombian and the player he had to fight with for the starting place in Bologna, the hot one: Riccardo Calafiori.

We can see that Lucumí performs better than Calafiori in every range of passes difficulty apart from the most easy one in which they are in the same mould. Calafiori still is a much better than average passer, but not the best of the best - while still in the top 30 in Serie A -, but that’s doesn’t mean Lucumí is the better defender.

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