Lately I've been missing from the newsletter — as usual, to be fair — but I was, and still am, reviewing transfers on X (it just feels faster to do, sorry friends of the newsletter), so if you're interested in that side of things, check out my profile.
Today I want to write about something I find genuinely interesting, and it all started from a tweet by Charles Onwuakpa — whose main account, the one I read the tweet from, has since been suspended — in which he basically said Juventus needed a self-sufficient striker. This is something every club would like to have, but in Italy it's almost a requirement: to be a good team, or a good striker who survives this league, you need someone who can create something out of nothing.
In the past I already built something that pointed in that direction, though it wasn't that specific: a table of who produced the most value immediately after a carry or a take-on.
Of course that's not exactly self-sufficiency — and was also designed to favors wingers and creative players more than strikers. So I asked Fable 5 to help me brainstorm and implement an improvement to find the self-sufficient strikers (it also helps me edit my drafts, if you were wondering).
And we did it. We kept the same pipeline but added filters and thresholds to focus it on the self-sufficient side of attacking play. Here's what counts as a self-created action now:
The outcome is a shot (valued by xG), a pass or cross (valued by atomic VAEP), or a foul drawn (valued by flipping the sign of the fouler's VAEP — the value the defender destroyed for his team is roughly the value you extracted from him).
The chain starts with the player doing it himself: a take-on, a ball win (interception or tackle), or a carry of at least 5 meters — the distance threshold filters out the small settling touches the data model inserts automatically, so a striker who just receives a through-ball and shoots doesn't get credit for "creating" anything.
The chain can run up to 3 consecutive actions, but every single one must be by the same player — the moment a teammate (or opponent) touches the ball, the chain breaks. So a heavy touch you recover yourself still counts; a teammate's layoff doesn't.
Everything is normalized per 30 minutes in possession, minimum 1000 minutes played.
In one line: value from shots and passes generated off your own take-on, ball win, or carry of at least 5 meters, with no teammate touch in between.
And I think the result is good, given the order of Serie A strikers from last season who came out on top for total value:
Keinan Davis is probably the most self-reliant striker in the league by the eye test too, and Simeone makes sense given he more or less kept Torino in Serie A by himself. Morata surprised me at first — but a lot of his value comes from getting fouled, which the metric now captures explicitly.
The shape changes if you order by another metric, like shots per 30 in possession:
It's great to see Bonny and Pellegrino in the top 10 given their physical playstyle, and Stulic appears out of nowhere once you focus on shot volume alone.
I'd also love some Spanish experts to tell me what they think of this La Liga list ordered by shots. I really like that Espí is up there (Álvaro Rodríguez too — I'm a fan), but I couldn't tell you whether the others check out:
I think this is good enough as a proxy built on event data alone, but I recognize it would be much better with tracking data involved — to properly define what self-sufficiency is, or to identify players who play a lot of isolation situations. There's also a broader question about what an isolation striker should be able to do, and that's why in my app and in my striker evaluations I also look at things like long balls received successfully and the percentage of possessions the team keeps after one of them. Scouting strikers is complex once you consider the context they play in, so every little step that clears up a doubt is a victory.
Thanks for the attention, as always. I'd really appreciate any support for my work — likes, retweets, or sharing in any form you like. I'm very active on LinkedIn too.
