What did the recent Euro 2020 UEFA Championship show us about how players are developed around Europe?
There were 624 players named in the 24 squads for the exciting tournament and looking into their individual journeys shows just how diverse the experience can be.
The first thing to note is how close to home players generally start their progression towards the professional ranks.
I looked at when the players from all 24 nations in the tournament first got involved with clubs within the national league set-ups of the countries that they were raised in.
Ireland senior men’s team manager Stephen Kenny has named a fresh looking squad for upcoming friendlies against Andorra and Hungary with Irish fans hoping that the team’s search for a first win under their new boss will come to an end.
Despite scoring twice against Serbia in their opening World Cup qualifier in March and then again versus Qatar in a friendly, there remains the hope rather than expectation that the Irish team can start to become a serious threat in front of goal.
One of the great Marmite topics of recent seasons has been the emergence of terminology in football that seems to drive some people crazy – such as assists, xG (expected goals), xA (expected assists) and other phrases.
The modernisation of analysis of the game means that far more data is available to pour through. Obviously, for a large amount of people nothing other than “which team scored more goals than the other team” is the data they want to know about.
While that’s understandable, it does dismiss an opportunity to get greater understanding of how a team is doing or a player is performing that isn’t clearly obvious from a simple scoreline of a game. How many times have you watched game where you thought the losing side was desperately unlucky or a player on the losing side had actually been the best player on show?
When it comes to the Ireland senior men’s football team, results have been very poor but these have clouded over the positive aspects of most of the performances. I recently looked back on the basic problem the Irish football team has had in scoring goals in the past five years and you can read that here.
Following that up through this piece, I’ve tried to delve even deeper to see how the Irish team is actually performing and how the individual Irish players are doing in comparison to their club form. The use of xG (Expected Goals) will appear so fair warning now if that is of no interest to you.
The perennial argument with the Republic of Ireland football team is whether the players are good enough to produce a more expansive style of play than that which they have produced essentially for the best part of the last ten years.
Passing the ball has become less of a priority to the Irish team when in possession since 2008 when Giovanni Trapattoni took over as manager and in the reign of present incumbent Martin O’Neill there has been no discernible attempt to use a passing style of play.
Recently I showed that only four nations even tried to pass the ball less often than we did out of the 55 teams in the UEFA section of the World Cup qualifiers: Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Andorra. That statistic really surprised me and has made me think about why that is the case. Continue reading Facts not opinion: Why do Irish players pass the ball less with their country?→
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