The Backpage | Stats Entertainment

In this week’s Backpage, Darren Cross reveals a geeky passion for footy stats, then tells you how to find your own for FIFA 11 and what you can do with the info…

I love stats.

Now I realise that makes me sound like a huge geek, but I’m fine with that. In my day job as a football writer I absolutely rely on them. Mostly that means checking the slightly less interesting kind of stats, like the number of appearances a player has made, how many international caps he’s won and even what size boots he wears.

But sometimes a stat will pop up that’s genuinely amazing and, in an office full of football fans, it’ll quickly become a talking point.

That happened last week when we learned that, in the second leg of Barcelona’s Champions League game against Arsenal, both Xavi and Iniesta individually completed more passes than the whole of the Arsenal team combined.

Read that again.

Amazing, right? To be really geeky about it, The Gunners made 199 successful passes as a team, while Barça collectively clocked up 738, with midfielders Xavi and Iniesta contributing over 200 each.

EACH!

Incredible. And no wonder Barcelona have a total pass completion rate of over 90% so far for this Champions League campaign as a whole.

Sticking with the passing theme, did you know that the current top five teams in the Premier League have completed more passes than any of the teams below them? Or that Fulham midfielder Danny Murphy is statistically the top passer in the Premier League?

So there are those kind of stats that are interesting to football fans, and that give us something to impress our mates with.

But there’s another type of stat that I find interesting for a different reason… because they’re genuinely useful.

The football industry has been aware of this for many years, which is why most – if not all – Premier League clubs now employ technical analysts who monitor things like how many passes a player makes, how many of his tackles are successful and how far he has run in a match. All of which is useful information to a manager when it comes to feeding back to a player on both his strengths and his weaknesses.

So what has all this got to do with FIFA?

Well, I’m bringing this up because there’s a wealth of stats about your game available to you that can help you see what you’re doing right – and where it might be going wrong – in the game.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that taking the time to look at the Match Details screen is a good way to quickly identify if you’re overplaying in games, which you can find out by looking at your possession percentage in comparison to your shots stat (if you spent considerably more time on the ball than your opponent, but had fewer attempts on goal, you’re probably not taking the opportunities to shoot when they arise).

While this screen is great for feedback on an individual match, there’s a whole ton of stats available to you online that will give you an overall picture of your game.

Registering with www.ea.com/uk/football and linking your account gives you access to your EA SPORTS Football profile, where you will find loads of interesting and useful information, some of which you can use to correct areas of your game that might be letting you down.

Clicking on the My Game Data tab will bring up a page full of facts and figures that are well worth taking a moment to check out. Here you’ll be able to see exactly how many games of FIFA 11 you’ve played, how many of those have been wins or losses and your dreaded DNF number. Mine, by the way, is at one, despite having never intentionally disconnected – honest!

There’s also a column called Your Skills, and it’s here where the clues to your strengths and weakness can be found. You’ll get your tackle success, pass success, average time in possession per game, average goals – even the amount of corners you win per game.

It’s an interesting read, but the trick is reading between the lines. For example, on average I have 54% possession with an overall pass completion rate of 83%. Not quite Barça standards, but not bad. This tells me that I’m alright at keeping the ball, so I probably don’t need to focus to much on improving there.

Had my possession and completion stats been less than 50%, I’d recognise that I’m not keeping the ball for long enough, then giving it away too quickly when I do have it, and I’d work on sorting that out in my next game.

Goals-wise, on average I score two goals for every eight shots, which means I’m putting away just 25% of my total attempts. Not a nice number, but – taking into account the saves the keeper makes – that probably means over half of my attempts on goal are at least hitting the target. To give that some perspective, Arsenal’s shot accuracy in the Prem this season is 50%, the highest in the division. So, again, not too bad there.

It doesn’t all make good reading though; my tackle success is just 58%, so I’m missing almost half of my attempts to win the ball back. This tells me it’s an area I need to work on. Perhaps I’m committing to tackles too soon, or taking up poor positions before trying to win the ball back. Either way, it’s something I’m going to pay a bit more attention to over my next few games.

Of course, a click back on to my profile in ten games time will tell me if what I’m trying is better, or worse, than before.

You see… useful stats.

It’s worth mentioning here that you can get tons of other info from the site, like your current win streak, a list of all your recent opponents and loads more. But that’s not all, you can also search for any of your friends then take a look at their stats – all you need to know is their online name. Once you’ve found them, there’s even a ‘compare’ button that shows both sets of stats side-by-side, giving one of you plenty of ammunition for some good banter should you find you’re way better than your mate in one area.

So, even if you’re not a massive stats geek like me, a few minutes spent checking your own numbers might prove useful when it comes to taking your game to the next level.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Darren

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