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Attacking wingbacks in top 5 leagues in Europe

Introduction

In football, wingbacks are the outside defenders in a team's defense, with much more emphasis on attack. They are typically used in a formation with 3 centre-backs and are called by the names left wingbacks and right wingbacks. In a formation with 2 center-backs like 4-3-3, they play very high to add more width in attack.

In this project I will focus on attacking aspects of the wingbacks of top teams in 5 European Leagues: Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and League 1. The main purposes are to check if there is a trend of using wingbacks in attack and to evaluate how well wingbacks take part in bulding up their team's play.

This project is inspired by Edd Webster, Sergi Lehkyi and Khuyen Tran.

Methodologies

  1. Scrape the data from https://understat.com/.
  2. Cleanse the data.
  3. Analyze and visualize the data. One of the main terms used for analysis is xGChain90-the expected goal chain per 90 minutes. Basically, this stat measures the involvement of a player in attacking by assigning to him a number, which is deduced from the expected goal of all possessions he joins (only possesions which lead to a shot are counted), detailed explanation at https://statsbomb.com/2018/08/introducing-xgchain-and-xgbuildup/.
  4. Rank the best wingbacks and visualize by radar charts.

Findings

  1. Actually there is a trend of using wingbacks in attack, indicated by the graph

  1. The best wingback is Alphonso Davies from FC Bayern Munich with leading xGChain90 and xGBuildup90.

  1. Trent Alexander-Arnold from Liverpool FC is the best wingback in terms of stats directly related to goals, e.g key passes, expected assists.