Finding the best wingers of Austria – data analysis

While we looked in the other data analyses of this series already at the best centre-backs, full-backs, defensive midfielders, and offensive midfielders of Austria, today the wingers are the group we will take a more detailed look at by using data and statistics. We already found some interesting young talents besides the already well-known stars and regular starters of Austria.

In this data analysis, we will use statistics to find the best wingers of Austria to then talk about the players who stood out in the comparison. All the data which is used in this analysis are the average statistics per 90 minutes.

Comparison

Before we look at the graphs and results of my comparison, I want to make clear which filters I used to understand which players are in my pool and which aren’t. Basically, the most important metric is that the players need to be Austrians and Franco Foda has to be able to nominate them for the Austrian national team. Furthermore, the men must have played in this season for at least 1015 minutes since otherwise, the data cant tell us that much about them. Lastly, they need to primary play as wingers or wing-backs for their club.

I also added the filter that all wingers and wing-backs who play in Austria’s second division and are 23 years old or older will be eliminated, since a player who plays at this age and is still not in the Austrian Bundesliga, or an even more competitive league, will not be interesting for Foda and nor will he be in the upcoming months and years. So all the players in this data analysis who play in Austrias second-tier are 22 years old or younger.

The German head coach of Austria mainly lines his team up in a 4-2-3-1 formation and prefers the pair of David Alaba and Valentino Lazaro on the wings. Since Alaba played mainly as a full-back and centre-back for Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga and the UEFA Champions League this season, he won’t be included in this data analysis. Lazaro played 1294 minutes for Inter and Newcastle United this season, and will also be an important player in this data analysis.

Since there are so many different metrics which are interesting when we talk about the wingers, we will have four graphs before we look at some players in more detail. In the first one, we use two statistics which tell us how often a player tries to go past opponents with the ball at his feet and how successful he is in it as we can see in the following graph.

Manprit Sarkaria of Austria Vienna is the player with the highest number of dribbles per game with 9.11, but his success rate isn’t that outstanding (48.35%). Floria Kainz is with 63.38% completed dribbles, the player with the best success rate while Thomas Murg and Karim Onisiwo (who can play as a centre forward and a winger) have decent values for both categories. Meanwhile, Lazaro has stats of 4.94 attempted dribbles and a success rate of 50.7% in both categories average values.

Next, we want to know how many and what kind of progressive actions the players make per game. Therefore, we look at the progressive runs and the progressive passes per 90 minutes.