There's pretty much a Johan Cruyff quote for everything. For today's purposes, we'll start with this one:
"Football is a sport that you play with your brain. You have to be in the right place at the right moment: not too early, not too late."
And then we'll expand on that idea with this one:
"It is statistically proven that players actually have the ball for three minutes on average. So, the most important thing is: What do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball? That is what determines whether you're a good player or not."
He's right, of course, and it speaks to the challenge of the world's most popular sport: Everyone's eyes are on the ball, but almost everything that happens in a game is happening somewhere else. This makes scouting incredibly hard, from both a video and data perspective. We naturally remember what the player with the ball did, and that gets anchored in our minds. You have to make an active effort to pay attention to what the players off the ball are doing.
And unless you're at the stadium, you often can't see all of those players. This poses a problem for data collection, but the bigger issue with the numbers we use to summarize games is that they're almost all tied to the ball: who wins it, who shoots it, who dribbles it, who heads it, who passes it. Millions of data points are collected every match, and they're still missing most of what's happening in those 87 other minutes.
Today, though, we're going to shift the focus, move the spotlight to the rest of the field, and put the ball in the shadows. Who are the best players in the world without the ball this season? Introducing your Off-Ball Best XI.
