Leeds United Player Review 20/21 — Wingers
Salutations and welcome to the 2nd part of my player review for the 20/21 Premier League season, last time I looked at Strikers and when I say strikers I pretty much just looked at Patrick Bamford.
This time I’m going to look at our wingers for the season, this will mean I’ll be analysing a wider group of players. The players I will look at will be Jack Harrison, Raphinha, Helder Costa & Ian Poveda. Although I will naturally spend more time looking at Raphina & Harrison since they are the players who have played the most minutes.
I will be taking a quite data heavy look into these players as I do with most of my articles, I will also mix in some basic video analysis too. All of the data from this article is sourced from FBREF who in turn are provided their data by Statsbomb.
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Left Wing & Jack Harrison
Firstly I want to look at the left flank, primarily this position has been played by Jack Harrison who has had a very productive season, especially productive when you consider it is his first season in the Premier League. Jack has the 2nd most goal contributions in the squad with 16(8 Goals & 8 Assists)
This position is somewhat of a throwback to older winger styles, Jack is asked to play primarily as an old school winger who is mainly tasked with beating his man and putting crosses into the box. This is evidenced by Jack making the most crosses p90 of any other Leeds United player with 3.8 crosses made per90, he also has the most completed crosses to penalty area in the squad with 0.63 p90.
This isn’t to say that this is all Jack does in wide areas of course, but it is where he creates most of his chances. We have also seen many occasions where he has got past his man and instead chose to pass to a player inside the box too, if you take a look at the below visual you can see what I mean.
Further evidence on how active Jack is in wider areas can be found if we look at his heatmap below. Jack spends a lot of his time in wide areas and doesn’t often step infield. You can see the difference in this direct comparison between him and Raphinha.
Another thing worth noting is that Jack doesn’t attempt as many dribbles as any other of our wide options, he tries to run past his man 2.5 times p90 which is a lot less than Raphinha who attempts 4.5 p90, he even has less p90 than Helder Costa who has 3.2 p90 and lastly we have Ian Poveda who actually attempts the most p90 with 5.7, albeit there is a caveat with Poveda as he has played a lot less minutes than any other player only playing 355 minutes which skews his stats a lot in his favour.
One thing to note is that although Jack attempts to run past his marker less than the others he does have the 2nd highest success rate out of our wide players, he gets past his man 59% of the time, bettered only by Poveda who beats him by 0.1% with 59.1%. Raphinha has the 2nd lowest at 51.7% then at the bottom of this is Costa with 46.3%.
Taking the above into consideration two things are possible, either Bielsa tells Harrison to be more careful with who he tries to get past so we keep hold of the ball more and gives Raphinha more freedom, or Harrison is naturally more careful with the ball than Raphinha is and Raphinha is more inclined to run past his player because it’s who he is as a player. I’m leaning towards the latter as in games when Raphinha has played on the left wing he has still attempted more dribbles than anyone else on the field, like against Aston Villa when he played 90 minutes on the left wing and he attempted 4 dribbles and completed 100% of them.
I am by no means an expert and it’s equally possible that Bielsa uses them the way he does because they naturally fit the mould that he wants on both sides of the pitch and thus uses their strength’s to attempt to fulfil as many of his desired tactical instructions to the best of their ability.
Right Wing & Raphinha
Next let us see what the difference is on the opposite flank when we look at our Brazilian dynamo Raphinha. As you would expect Raphinha’s role is a lot more varied than Jack Harrison’s is when it comes to his main attacking emphasis.
Raphinha is asked to run at players more and play in the right half space a lot, he comes infield a lot more than Jack does and this shows pretty well in his heatmap for the season. He also has more influence inside the box than Jack does, he is asked to get into the box with his running more and I feel is better at this than Harrison is.
As you can see in the below visual from March, Raphinha hadn’t created many chances from the side of the box(Red area) and created a lot more from just ahead of the box on the right and around the right half space(Purple Area)
Below is a great example of Raphinha’s chance creation from the half space when he assisted Jack Harrison in the below goal. He runs into the right half space, the ball is played to him by Tyler Roberts, he dribbles deeper into the box then slots a pass over to Harrison who has a simple tap-in finish given to him on a silver platter.
Next we have another example, Raphinha has the ball in a wide area, he drifts in field dribbles a little further and then noticing Harrison out wide with lots of space he releases the ball and Harrison finishes beautifully.
The last thing which I feel we look to do more on the right hand side is progress the ball, we build up more in the right channels and then switch the ball to the left if needed. A big part of this is Luke Ayling, One of his strengths is being pretty press resistant, he’s really good at playing the ball out under pressure. Since we naturally build up more on the right flank this means that we play more progressive passes on the right.
Raphinha plays more progressive passes than any other wide midfielder for Leeds with 5.2 being played p90, this is considerably more than the main left sided player Harrison who creates 3.5. He also creates more passes into the final third with 3.1 p90 while Harrison creates 1.2 which is considerably less.
Premier League Levels
I think that covers the main things our left and right sided wingers look to do and how they differentiate in style, now I want to see how our wingers compare to their Premier League peers. All of the visuals in this section only include players with 1000 or more Premier League minutes, which means Ian Poveda isn’t included.
Also as another note, I will only be comparing our players to Premier League wingers so we can obtain an accurate representation of their output against their positional peers.
Penalty Area Entries
The first thing I want to check is how often our players enter the penalty box with both passes & ball carrying. Both are equally important from wide players and we’ve already discussed which side is expected to do more of each. Let’s see if this matches up.
Firstly looking at entries to the penalty box, we can see only one player who completes an above average amount of passes & crosses to the penalty box, Jack Harrison completes 0.63 crosses & 2.1 passes into the penalty area p90 and as a side note Jack is in the top 10 amongst other wingers in the league for both Passes(10th) & crosses(9th) his efforts are considerably higher than Raphinha’s 0.34 crosses & 1.6 passes.
As we discussed previously Jack is expected to complete more crosses than his opposite winger, it seems this also includes passes too. Now we should check to see who completes more ball carries to the penalty area and where they rank next to the rest of the wingers in the league.
As we can see above Raphinha completes more carries to the penalty area than Harrison does. This isn’t surprising as we expected this, neither of these players are in the top 10 in this section and only Raphinha is above the league average.
As a side note although Poveda can’t be included due to the low amount of minutes, his stats for this are very good with 1.79 p90. Hopefully we can see if this continues if Poveda is given more opportunities next season.
The last player not included here is Helder Costa, although he does have sufficient minutes he didn’t make this list he has 0.86 p90.
Goal & Chance Creation
Firstly let’s see where our players rank in terms of Expected assists(xA), xA for those who aren’t stat buffs like me is a metric used alongside Expected goals(xG), when a player assists a shot he is awarded with the Expected Assist for this shot, and the xA matches the xG from the shot.
This is a good way of showing how many goals a player should have assisted, which is something pure assists can’t show as assists rely on the player actually scoring the goal.
Below is the top rated wingers when it comes to xA per 90 and as you can see both of our players feature.
Now looking at the below image you can see the players actual assists p90, both Raphinha & Jack Harrison end up with higher assists per90 than their xA per90. This is down to clinical finishing and good quality ball delivery.
Let’s move onto some other chance creation metrics to see how they compare, firstly we can see Openplay Shot Creating Actions(SCA), a shot creating action is the two actions before a shot is taken such as dribbles, passes, fouls drawn & even the shot taker themselves. Then we have key passes, a key pass is simply a pass which results in a shot.
As we can see both Jack Harrison & Raphinha are above average for Key Passes & SCA. However, Helder Costa is very low in this field which could explain why we are looking for another winger. Raphinha creates the 4th most Key Passes of any winger in the league with 2.5 and is 14th for SCA with 3.1.
Harrison isn’t in the top 10 for either with 1.8 Key Passes & 3.1 SCA. So he matches up with Raphinha for SCA which is a positive for him.
Ball Progression
Now let’s move onto league wide Ball progression, I don’t feel people give enough respect to ball progression. This is key for any team, there are two types of progressive actions, passes & carries. Passes are considered progressive when they move the ball 10 yards or more towards the opposition goal and do not start in the defensive third of the pitch, progressive carries must move the ball with their feet 5 yards or more towards the opposition goal.
Here we see once again Helder Costa is in a very bad position, below average for both Carries & Passes. This time both Harrison & Raphinha are above average for Progressive Passes but both of them are bang on the average line for Carries.
Raphinha has the 5th most Progressive Passes of any wingers with 5.2 and he has 6.1 progressive carries. As I said before both of them match up on carries so Harrison has the same as Raphinha, but Harrisons Passes are less at 3.5.
As a team we don’t carry the ball as much as some other teams so it isn’t as big of a deal that we aren’t league leaders in this stat. However we do progress much more through passing so it’s important our wingers are capable ball progressors.
Defensive Output
As we all should be aware, Leeds press more than anyone else in the league. We try to squeeze our opponents for every pass they try to make. This means that pressing is very important to Bielsa’s attackers. They have to be capable of running a lot and closing down players.
They also need to help out their fullbacks when the first part of the press is broken, so they must be able to pitch in and tackle or intercept balls.
As we can see here two of our players are above average for both Pressures & Tackles/Interceptions(T&I). They are Costa & Harrison, Raphinha is above average for T&I but below average for Pressures.
I was surprised that our wingers weren’t the league leaders in these metrics, however we do dominate the ball more than most teams, we have the 4th highest possession stats with 57.6% average possession. There are no players in the top right area from teams who have more possession than we do.
Raphinha is still new to this Bielsa side in comparison to Costa/Harrison so it is only natural that he is still learning the pressing patterns. However I feel as the season has progressed he has improved this part of his game a lot and we should see him improve this even more. He still has a strong 2.6 T&I and a reasonable 15.3 pressures.
Costa puts out the most pressures amongst our wingers with 20.7 pressures and he contributes 2.8 T&I. Whereas Harrison has exactly 20 pressures & 2.9 T&I. Based of these you can see that Costa still contributes a lot when it comes to defensive output and this could mean he still has something to offer the team.
Goal Threat
The last part of the stats to check over is the team’s goal threat, which player offers us the most in terms of dangerous shots and who over/under performs their Expected Goals tally.
Here we can see both Harrison & Costa finish above average goals per90 and both overperform their xG. Harrison was our strongest performer with 0.25 goals per 90 and he overperformed his xG by 1.7 goals, this means he scored 1.7 more goals than he should have scoring 8 goals from 6.3 xG.
Helder Costa also overperformed his xG and finished above average for goals per90. He had 0.23 goals p90 and overperformed his xG by 1 goal scoring 3 goals from 2 xG.
Lastly we have Raphinha who was also above average for goals p90 with 0.23(Same as Costa) but this time Raphinha actually matched his xG scoring 6 goals from 6 xG.
Lastly I couldn’t bypass this section without highlighting how poorly Timo Werner has done, underperforming his xG by 5.9 goals.
Conclusions
I have covered a lot of stats and metrics to try to show how well our players stack up to the rest of the league’s wingers and wide midfielders. The answer is that they stack up very well. Both players have their strengths compared to each other and bring a lot to our team.
Next time you hear someone say, “Harrison can’t cross” then please make sure you point out that he is in the top 10 amongst other wingers for both completed crosses & passes into the penalty area.
Also if someone says Helder Costa offers nothing to this team, please point out he offers a lot defensively and his finishing is as good as Harrison/Raphinha.
These players have been a big part as to why we finished where we did in the league. They have entertained us, caused us frustration at times but overall we really cannot complain about them.
I hope you have enjoyed this article and look forward to my next one, which will analyse our Central Midfielders.
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