Last week, we looked at five talents from the Vanarama National League who have had an excellent season so far and have the potential to make the step up to the EFL in the future. Well, this week, we continue in our search for non-league talents, as we look to find the most creative players in the National League North and South (step 2, sixth tier in England) according to the data. This data analysis will dive into several key metrics to see who excels in a creative fashion – from pure goal assists to various passing metrics; we hope to highlight some names who are critical to their teams tactics.
Criteria
We wanted to keep this analysis open in terms of criteria as we want to find the top performers in terms of creativity regardless of position and age. The only condition we have set in this tactical analysis is that we are only considering players who have played a minimum of 600 minutes at the time of writing – this will allow us to see who is performing consistently over the course of the season.
To select a base group of players for analysis, we have viewed the assists ranking across the National League North & South – the top 25 players in this metric at the time of writing will be used for every metric included in this analysis. Of course, this will eliminate some players who you may have thought would be included in the data, but exclusion does not mean they are not creative. We have selected the top 25 players in the assists rankings as these players lead the way creatively, which fits this articles purpose – we will be able to see how creative and effective these players are outside of just assisting goals.
Chance creation
This first section of analysis contains metrics and statistics that relate directly to assisting goals as well as data that scratches beneath the surface in chance creation, looking at actions that could lead to assisting a goal. Crosses, key passes, and through balls are all included here to see where the assists could be more likely to come from.
Lets start with the obvious one – assists but with the added context of the team contribution metric (how much a players assist tally contributes to their teams goal tally. E.g. – assisting one goal of a teams tally of 10 goals would result in a team contribution rate of 10%). While we could have included the team contribution rate to other metrics in this analysis, it would not be totally relevant due to the variety of positions and roles included. For example, when we get to the crossing metric later on, there would be little point in looking at the team contribution % when there are players who naturally cross less (CFs, CMs), so ultimately, the information would not be pertinent to the analysis purpose.
Looking at assists alone, Luke Coulson of Dartford leads the way with seven assists at the time of writing, and as you can see, he also ranks second) in terms of team contribution, setting up an impressive 21.21% of Dartfords goals this season. The winger also has five goals to date, so he is clearly an incredibly influential figure for the club.
However, Coulsons team contribution r
