Where Goals Come From: The Five Progressive Passes
/By Jamon Moore
This is the third article in a series of articles and videos in the Where Goals Come From project from Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter.
Parts one and two:
Where Goals Come From - Jamon Moore and Carl Carpenter
Where Goals Come From: Tactical Progressive Passing Movements - Carl Carpenter
A companion article to this one:
Where Goals Come From: Passing in the Final Third - Carl Carpenter
In part one, we showed how teams that score more goals per game and per season use progressive passes to set up shots that are more likely to be scored than other types of shots, regardless of league or level in the professional game. Teams that concede fewer goals over time generally start by conceding fewer goals created from progressive passes. To maximize goal differential, clubs should focus on areas that have the biggest impacts.
Key points:
Having established in our first article the Progressive Pass category is the most important category for improving goal differential, we can focus on the types of progressive passes in this category and which ones provide the best opportunities for attacking success and the most danger to defend against for defensive success.
We are expanding the Where Goals Come From framework to include a new level: key pass types and individual actions. These key pass types and actions help us better describe types of goals and provide context to how clubs can use them to align on their particular attacking and defending philosophy, principles, and game model.
By looking at the conversion rates of key passes we can determine which progressive passes best create repeatable, high-value chances.
Teams can improve their scoring opportunities using these key pass types with well-drilled and purposeful movement on and off the ball.
A refresher: Various types of open-play progressive passes consistently create 40% of all goals scored in all professional leagues
In our first article, we identified five goal categories: Progressive Pass, Basic Pass, Set Piece Pass, Individual Play, and Set Piece Kick. In every observed league, around 40% of goals are scored from the Progressive Pass category. We have established this is true for women’s leagues and lower-level men’s leagues in addition to top men’s leagues.
These baseline values vary little from league-to-league and season-to-season.
Key passes are the key
Not every progressive pass is intended to result in a shot, but the more vertical ones are designed to break lines and create an advantageous position relative to the number of defenders between the ball and the goal. More horizontal balls such as crosses and cutbacks generally attempt to find areas the defenders are not occupying.
The focus of this article is on the progressive passes that become key passes -- passes that directly lead to a shot or goal. Some providers and coaches will refer to these key passes as creating “chances” and some situations as “half-chances”.
Analysts and some others in a club will use Expected Goals (xG) to measure the quality of the chance that is created. These analysts also use Expected Assists (xA) to measure the quality of the key pass that created the chance. While this is important, we will continue to defer the Expected Goals discussion to a future article while we lay more groundwork first to propose how to close the communication gap that exists in many clubs.
Some types of key passes may also be used as a secondary key pass (e.g., “hockey assist”) and tertiary key pass. An example could be a vertical progressive pass that sets up a cross. Future research will look deeper into these secondary and tertiary key pass areas.
The key pass types in each goal category
The focus of this article will be on how teams can best use Progressive Pass key pass types to hit their goal differential target or to strategize how they will concede fewer of these goals. Season-long goal differential, the most important measurement of a team’s success within their control, is largely determined by this category.
In this article, we are defining the key pass types within three of the goal categories. We also want to compare this to Individual Play situations that don’t require a key pass. For this analysis we will use the following key pass types:
Right away, you will notice we have five Progressive Pass category key pass types, in addition to two each in the Basic Pass and Set Piece Pass categories. We will use None to talk about the Individual Play category at this level because there is no key pass. We are not including Set Piece Kicks.
Let’s look more closely at the five Progressive Pass key pass types:
The five Progressive Pass key pass types are:
Through balls behind the defense
Cutbacks starting between the 6- and 18-yard box
Crosses mostly from outside the box
Long balls over 35 yards in length
Other Progressive passes (diagonal and vertical, less than 35 yards in length) designed to disorganize or distract defenses
In addition to the Progressive Pass key pass types, we have defined two Basic Pass key pass types:
Normal for non-progressive footed passes
Head pass for headed passes
And two Set Piece Pass key pass types:
Corner kicks for passes from corner kicks
Set Piece passes for non-Corner passes from dead balls, such as a kick after a foul or a throw-in.
We’ll further define and cover the Basic Pass and Set Piece Pass key pass types in more detail in a future article.
For this article, we’ll also include Individual Play category shots from open-play that don’t come from a key pass. We’ve identified the key pass as None for shots and goals in the Individual Play category in this article.
In the Set Piece Kicks category, we have both Free Kick Shots which are generated from dangerous situations outside the box, and Penalty Kick Shots which come mainly from dangerous situations created from progressive passes inside the box. Because both of these shot types are related to execution in the other categories, we will not be including these in our key pass analysis in this article.
Defining Cutbacks
For our analysis of key passes, we have defined cutbacks. The cutback zones are the areas on each side of the six-yard box. Passes that start in one of these zones, and go horizontal or backward (a forward pass from these zones would qualify as a “progressive” pass rather than a cutback) and end up within or in front of the six-yard box up to the edge of the 18 (i.e., in front of goal), qualify in our case.
Again, your analysts can provide their own definition, but doing so can impact some alignment with this analysis.
Progressive Pass key pass types generally have higher conversion rates
As you can imagine, from the roughly 40% of goals coming from the Progressive Pass category, four of its five key pass types are more efficient at producing goals than any type in the other three categories shown above. This allocation helps us understand at a high level “where goals (and goals against) come from” in this framework.
Similar to our goal category distributions, the shot conversion rates across our five leagues are about the same, with some variation on the conversion rates of through balls and cutbacks in the English Premier League.
Looking at over 250,000 shots in the past six complete seasons in these five leagues, we can see teams are generally creating shots into the wrong “buckets” to produce goals.
As our big shot conversion visualization showed, only 5% of Normal-type key passes result in a goal. 10.5% of shots without a key pass are scored. The Progressive type of key pass gives a modest 13.3% return.
We see here that, just like our Goal Categories, the distribution of key pass types league-to-league is very much the same. This confirms the efficiencies and inefficiencies we’re discussing here for shot selection applies anywhere.
The overly simplistic conclusion here is teams should create more Through balls and Cutback key pass types while identifying situations where Normal shots are wasted. Despite its conversion rate, as we’ll see in future research, Crosses require a high number of attempts to produce a shot.
Basic opposition analysis
In our first article, we demonstrated the five goal categories can be useful in seeing how teams score goals or where they are vulnerable to attack. This provides better insight into the types of goals a player scores or the general situations players create assists and key passes.
Now that we have identified key pass types, this provides even better detail that may be useful for opposition analysis or even for scouting purposes. We will do a much deeper dive into the possibilities in a future article.
Note: All Premier League data shown is as of February 14
Using historical information, we can quickly see how teams are scoring their goals. We can quickly see their most important attacking strengths and defending weaknesses using information like the above. Let’s say we’re facing Liverpool next week. We know recently they are not scoring goals at the same clip as they were in 2019-20. In the above chart, we can see how they have scored goals over the whole season. We certainly look into the last few games and see what’s changed. Here we’re using a side-by-side comparison of this season and last season.
We can see Liverpool have shifted their distribution of goals mainly from the Long ball key pass type to the None which means they are relying much more on individuals. They are also less proficient on Set Piece passing this season. The absence of the Long ball goal this season is likely due to losing Virgil van Dijk to injury and moving Jordan Henderson out of his natural position to compensate. We can look at player key pass data to confirm these findings.
We can also see they’ve scored 13 goals from Individual Play (the None key pass type), the most in the Premier League this season. We’ve found nine of these 13 goals have come from Mohamed Salah and Sadie Mane when we look at Premier League players with six or more goals.
We can use video and further data analysis to see how they scored those goals and formulate a game plan of how to prevent those situations.
In our competitive analysis, we can move on to determining what types of goals Liverpool are conceding and formulating a game model within our style of play of the ways they can be broken down.
Conclusion
Given 40% of goals are scored with a progressive key pass, it is crucial for clubs to understand in their philosophy, strategy, scouting, principles, and game model, how they will use progressive passes and defend against them to create an advantage and to increase their goal differential.
Each team will arrive at their own ways of taking advantage of the situations progressive passes in the middle and final thirds afford them, but certain aspects are near immutable, including the rate of converting certain passes to turn into shots and the rate of converting shots from these passes into goals.
Key points:
Key pass types and individual actions that create shots are in the second level of the Where Goals Come From framework, but all exist under one of the five goal categories.
The Progressive Pass category has five different key pass types that can be used to create a shot. The Basic Pass category and Set Piece Pass category each have two basic key pass types.
Four of the five progressive key pass types have higher average conversion rates than any other shooting situation, except for a penalty kick.
Two of the four progressive key pass types, Through balls and Cutbacks, afford an average conversion rate over 25% in the four top European leagues and MLS, and similar conversion rates exist in women’s professional soccer and men’s second division soccer so far.
This next level of the framework allows us to do a deeper level of analysis on opponents and player scouting, bringing context lacking to simple goals and expected goals (xG) numbers, along with key passes and assists, beyond just the simple penalty/non-penalty and open-play/set-piece definitions.
For more detail, check out the video below.
About Jamon Moore
Jamon is a twenty-five-year professional in the high-technology industry who started as a software developer and is now in executive management overseeing business agility transformations with a specialization in high-technology. In addition to his analysis for ASA, he is a credentialed media member covering the San Jose Earthquakes. Jamon can be contacted via Twitter, and club analysts and executives can connect with Jamon on LinkedIn.
About Carlon Carpenter
Carlon is the current Tactical & Video Analyst for StatsBomb, one of the largest soccer data companies in Europe. Carlon also works as a contract employee for the U.S. Soccer youth national teams, working as a performance analyst for the U-17 men’s national team. Carlon can be contacted through his LinkedIn account, or via Twitter.