Following on from my analysis last week of Atalanta’s attacking ideals, specifically their rotations to create overloads and attacking chances, I wanted to look at their defensive work too.
When looking at their defensive statistics there are some key areas which make Atalanta worth focusing on. Firstly, in Serie A this season, only Bologna and Torino have a higher PPDA, but Atalanta’s is still just 8.31. This ranks them 11th overall in the “Top Five” European leagues for PPDA. They also have the best defensive duel win percentage in Serie A, with a highly impressive 60.9%. In the top five leagues, only Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, and Paris Saint-Germain rank above them for both PPDA and for having a better defensive duel win percentage.
Of course, with data, context is key, so to see how Atalanta measure up against the best in the top five leagues for both of these metrics, I took the data of the 25 best teams for each metric, and then cut out any teams with a lower defensive duel win percentage of 57, and a higher PPDA than 12, which left us with the following graph below.
There are some expected names, but also some less so. RB Leipzig have the highest defensive duel win percentage out of anyone in Europe’s top five, and it’s unsurprising to see the defensive duel win percentages generally increase the higher a team’s PPDA is, however, if we look at those with similar PPDA’s to Atalanta let’s say nine or lower, it is clear to see that along with Bayern Munich, PSG, and Leverkusen, Atalanta are one of Europe’s elite pressing sides, and that to have such a high defensive duel win percentage alongside these PPDA numbers is somewhat of an anomaly.
They also have the lowest xGA of any team in Serie A and the sixth lowest in Europe’s top five with an xGA of 25.35. They are allowing 9.92 shots against per game, with only Roma recording less domestically, yet their 97.26 ball losses per game, the fifth-highest in the league, belies a team that beat their opponents through suffocating them with possession, even if their 55.9% average possession is the third-highest in the league. Napoli and Sassuolo both average 58.8% and 56.2%, respectively, whilst Roma just 0.1% less than Atalanta with 55.8%, yet those three teams all record more than 10 fewer ball losses per game, well under the league average of 91.99, and all average in the bottom five in the league for ball losses, along with Inter Milan and Juventus.
