Playing the Long Game: Part One
Hoofball Merchants
At the start of the season, I envied the commentators and columnists who could nail down Jimmy Thelin’s Aberdeen’s ‘identity’ and playing style. There was still variation in approach, and it didn’t seem to me like we could label the Dons as high-pressing or high-possession.
As the weeks progressed, however, it seemed like the Dons became more focused on building out of the back and having more of the ball. This became an ongoing trope of this blog/newsletter/however you want to describe it—the apparent conflict between what appeared to be the Elfsborg Thelin we were sold and the Aberdeen Thelin we had got.
Thelin’s Elfsborg, it was said, were not concerned with possession, thrived on counter-attacks and played a lot of long balls/passes. Off the ball, they pressed high and turned the ball over a lot near the opponent’s goal. Here’s a profile of Thelin from a Sunderland website in late 2023 after he was linked to that job, which pretty sums all of that up if you’ve the time to read and scroll through the ads.
Evolution at Pittodrie
Over the last few matches, though, it does feel like we are starting to see the team be more direct in their approach with higher energy in the attacking half. It’s not been perfect, as anyone who watched St. Johnstone away will testify, but the January signings seemed to have helped.
I’ve been manually logging some Sofascore data recently, and since we’re at the 33rd game of the season, and it’s a neat narrative that can be made, and divides evenly, I’ve compared the three segments of Aberdeen’s season across a few metrics. In true clickbait style…THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU…
Maybe not, but it’s worth a look. This is Part One in which I lay out the data. Part Two (hopefully tomorrow, worst case, almost certainly Saturday morning) will take a look at some examples from recent games.
Phase 1: The ‘this is brilliant period’ - which concluded with the 4-1 win over Dundee - Games 1 to 11.
Phase 2: The ‘Swedish Fraud’ stage - starts with the St. Mirren loss concludes with the Rubezic and MacDonald horror show at Fir Park.
Phase 3: The ‘return to normality’ period - starts with the draw to Hearts (Doohan penalty), ends in the worst possible way on Sunday.
So the data that stuck out to me, and it seems to correlate with what we’re seeing on the field, is the number of long balls in each game.
What is a long ball?
I will say I did take the league averages from FotMob, but they all seem to line up, so I don’t think there’s too much issue with mixing the data sources.
So we can see that the Dons are hitting more long balls per game - 64.9 on average compared to 55.3 at the start of the season.
They are also getting more accurate with 27.5 per game in the last 11 matches, which is 42% of total long balls versus 35% (First 11) and 39% (Second 11).
At 27.5 per game Aberdeen would be 3rd in the league behind Dundee Utd (28.7 per game) and the Rangers (28.1). Sidebar: Note that the number of accurate passes doesn’t seem to affect your league placing (outside the top 2).
There is a caveat. Aberdeen are making more passes.
The number of long balls as a percentage of total passes has gone from 13.3% to 14.4%, over the season. The percentage of accurate long balls as a percentage of total accurate passes (e.g. the SPFL table shown above) has moved from 6% to 6.6% to 7.7%.
Leighton Clarkson does seem to be making a big contribution to these numbers in his deeper midfield role and the addition of Knoesters has helped from the back four. There’s more to dig into in terms of the whos and whys.
You forgot about Elfsborg
The good news, if you’re a fan of long balls, is that we might just be getting started.
The Swedish league does seem to be a lot higher than the SPFL for long balls so I don’t know if the categorisation of the data might be a little different, or maybe the artificial pitches lead to more longer passes.
Part Two
As I said I will try and get this out on Saturday morning looking at some on-field examples. P&J article from Sunday’s match is available here (if you can bear to relive it).
If life gets in the way, safe travels to all making their way to Hampden.
COYR
P.S. All the numbers I took can be found on Sofascore. But if you can’t be bothered looking through it all game by game you can download here. Just scroll to the bottom and select ‘get the data’.
I’m going to try and consolidate some of the other numbers I’ve recorded over the season into one file at some point.