Finding the best central midfielders from Norway’s OBOS-Ligaen – data analysis

In this data analysis piece, we will be looking out for the best central midfielders currently playing in OBOS-ligaen using statistics.

The best central midfielders are the most complete ones as modern managers are hugely dependent on their central midfielders for the team’s successful tactics.

In our analysis, we will be considering both the attacking as well as defensive attributes. Definitely passing is the most important trait for a midfielder so that won’t be missed for sure. We will be looking at players who have registered at least 900 minutes of football in the 2021 league season. Also, only proper central midfielders are taken into consideration i.e. no makeshift options included. 

We will shortlist the best options according to the statistics and data analysis.  While there are some top talents that are noticed in the Eliteserien, some hidden gems go unnoticed in the lower divisions. In this piece, we look into the players who might make the jump to the 1st tier soon. Let’s dive deep into the analysis.

Profiling the players

The most important thing for any player or position in football is probably to identify their best-suited abilities. Different players playing in the same position will have different abilities both offensively and defensively. Likewise, a central midfielder will show both defensive as well as offensive capabilities. In order to account for the profile of the CMs that we are looking into we compare them with respect to how well they perform their attacking and defensive actions. We can see the plot in the image below that compares the CMs in the OBOS-ligaen with this regard.

From the chart, we can see that the players are clustered based on their profile with some of the players doing extremely well in the attacking sense while some of them are good defensively and are just above average offensively. 

Andreas Dybevik  The 23-year old central midfielder from Bryne FK. The former Sandnes Ulf academy product has averaged 3 successful attacking actions per game and 10.46 successful defensive actions per game. Along with that, he has also averaged or won duels at the rate of 48% which is decent.