Analysing midfield playing styles in South America – data analysis

Getting a lot of individual metrics to evaluate a player and assess him this way can tell a lot about his playing style and in what team he would probably best suit in. However, there are some tools that can really underpin your evaluation that you get by looking at certain statistics, and one of them is Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

Overview

This concept was first presented to me by Mark Carey, who did this analysis previously with midfielders in top five leagues and with full-backs back in 2018.

What Mark Carey writes himself:

In broad terms, this analysis allows you to ‘zoom out’ and assess which players might be weighted towards a specific style, or which players have a broad range of styles and skills. Importantly, a PCA can help to provide a more holistic view of a player’s profile in a simplified way, rather than assessing them across 50+ individual metrics.

This is a great analysis tool as it allows us to take a lot of statistical metrics and convert it to smaller factors, and using these factors it is easier to draw conclusions for certain players. For this analysis, I got 22 variables, with the defensive metrics being possession adjusted and all the attacking metrics valued per 90 minutes.

In this data analysis, I will look into three South American leagues  Série A, Superliga and Liga MX  and with the help of PCA examine different midfield playing styles in those leagues as well as providing short scout reports on several players that did well in those categories. In total, 179 midfielders across those leagues were taken into this analysis, with the main criteria being the minimal playing time of 900 minutes.

Série A

The first league we will analyse is the Brazilian Série A, and in the picture below you can see the results of the analysis with four main types of midfielders in this league. Lets break down these four main types of midfielders starting from Midfielder One all the way to Midfielder Four. The bluer the particular metric, the higher influence it has on this midfield playing style.