Jonathan Northcroft: Is modern football becoming overly fixated with assists?

Before scoring, Maradona spun round Trevor Steven, feinted past Peter Beardsley and beat Terry Butcher as though England’s senior defender simply wasn’t there. He cut inside Terry Fenwick, dummied Peter Shilton and placed home a shot – the ball under command of the feet of God.

Enrique? He was the guy who rolled the ball to Maradona when the genius was double-marked, with his back to goal, in Argentina’s half, before beginning his run.

With a pass like that … Enrique’s joke always raises a smile.

Football used only rudimentary statistics in 1986 but if that Maradona goal happened now, Enrique’s “contribution” would generate more than a funny one-liner. It would score points in fantasy football games, determine bets big and small and improve Enrique’s ratings on ubiquitous computer games, such as Fifa and Football Manager, affecting millions of players and punters.

It would be recorded in football’s annals and enhance Enrique’s CV by improving his “numbers”. How? By triggering a magic piece of data: with that innocuous pass he would have registered an assist.

I’ve been thinking about assists after a reader’s letter in last week’s edition of The Sunday Times. Ali Kelman, from Fetcham, Surrey, took exception to one of Molly Hudson’s brilliant Euro 2022 reports. “Can you stop your correspondents claiming that passing the football somehow “assists” the goalscorer. This is nonsense. Beth Mead does not have four assists. All that happened was that she passed the ball to a teammate who scored. Passing the ball doesn’t enable or aid a player to beat a goalie,” Kelman wrote.

“An assist is when you help your gran carry her shopping.”

Grans everywhere will be grateful that someone is thinking about them (though I foresee headaches for Opta – when the Asda home-delivery man arrives at gran’s with her order, is that an assist?) but I’m also thankful to our reader, because the letter led me down a glorious YouTube rabbit hole. Search for “greatest assists”. Search for “50 best Maradona assists”. Search for “Zidane assist”. Have fun.

But Kelman also raises an important point. Assists have become such a mainstream metric that they appear under the scorelines on BBC reports, are discussed regularly in punditry and do seem to play a very real role in players’ careers (Jack Grealish is always talking about his need for “more assists"). But what are assists actually worth?

First, definitions. Opta, the game’s best-known data provider, regards an assist as “the final touch (pass, pass-come-shot or any other touch) leading to the recipient scoring a goal” and seems generous in what it includes: for example, a shot saved by the goalkeeper where someone scores the rebound is an assist; winning a penalty that gets converted is an assist.

Where do assists come from? Salvador Carmona, founder of Driblab, a football analytics company working with clubs all over the globe, including England, suggests basketball – where the NBA has been officially recording detailed assists date since the early 1960s – is the source.

Rory Smith, of The New York Times, agrees that the term’s origins are probably American. Smith has just authored a superb book, Expected Goals: The story of how data conquered football and changed the game forever, and notes that the assist was one of the first stats collected and widely discussed during a period in the 1990s where football shifted from recording only fundamental data, such as goals, scorers and fouls, towards the world of analysis and metrics we’re in today. As such, it was always emotive and disliked by traditionalists.

Smith quotes Graham Kelly, the former FA chief executive, who complained in a newspaper article that after the 1994 World Cup in the United States, the word “assist” entered football’s already tortured lexicon.

“What strikes me about that is it’s bizarre to pretend that in 1994 nobody was thinking about who was setting up goals,” Smith says. “Of course they were. Players would have had reputations for playing through-balls or crosses or whatever. So it’s not the concept people have an issue with, just the term.

“You get this a lot with data. It’s the same with xG [expected goals]. xG is a familiar concept to anyone who watches football. It’s a way of saying, ‘We had more and better chances than you.’ But because it has a sciencey name and the Americans came up with it, it’s perceived as pretentious.”

Another issue, Smith notes, is “all goals count equally but not all assists should” and Carmona sees the assist as “a simple concept, good for fans, but something I wouldn’t really use when analysing a potential signing. The reality is if you’ve a big number of assists you can’t be a bad player. But not having a number of assists doesn’t make you a bad assists-giver. You might just have bad teammates.

“Think of Cesc Fabregas. One year [2014-15] he had 18 assists for Chelsea and the next year [2015-16] it was just seven. People were on his case, saying he wasn’t trying, when he was playing the same way. His expected assists were similar to the year before. The difference was Chelsea had changed Diego Costa for Alvaro Morata.”

Maradona may have been the greatest of all assisters but he played almost entirely before assists were recorded. His highlights reel is surreal in its brilliance. There is footage of a bit of keepy-uppy followed by a casual layoff to create a goal, mazy dribbles, then a square pass to let a teammate tap in, final balls delivered to the scorer via overhead kicks, impish headers and rabona crosses.

The greatest assist may have been Maradona’s against Brazil at the 1990 World Cup, when he dribbled from the halfway line before slipping an almost impossible pass to the scorer, Claudio Caniggia, in the process taking six opponents out of the equation. Fernando Redondo (for Raul) v Manchester United in 2000, Dennis Bergkamp (for Freddie Ljungberg) v Juventus in 2001, Zinedine Zidane (for Javier Portillo) v Valencia in 2003 are also up there for daring and art.

Yet to say they are only “assists” and of the same value as Enrique’s 1986 pass is problematic. Carmona prefers more nuanced measurements of creativity, such as xA (expected assists) and xT (expected threat), a concept Driblab helped to pioneer. To understand the latter, watch an Isco goal for Real Madrid v Atletico Madrid in the 2018 Champions League semi-final. Karim Benzema collects a throw-in by the corner flag, swivels in a tight space and threads his way along the touchline past three defenders before playing a sublime cutback to Toni Kroos, whose shot is parried for Isco to slot home the rebound.

In assist terms, the credit goes to Kroos and Benzema is irrelevant but measured using xT – how much an action increases the likelihood of scoring – Benzema’s piece of play is off the charts, having taken Real from a 4 per cent to a 73 per cent chance of a goal.

The xA measurement is also revealing. In last season’s Premier League Harvey Barnes was joint third for assists (ten) – but only 42nd for xA (four). In other words, Leicester City’s good finishing significantly gilded his record. On the flipside Bruno Fernandes was 20th in the assist charts but fifth in terms of xA – the Portugal player suffering through United’s poor performance in front of goal. And spare a thought for Wilfried Zaha and Dwight McNeil, who each had one assist but xAs of 4.8, meaning teammates should have scored nearly five times the goals from the chances McNeil and Zaha created for Burnley and Crystal Palace respectively.

Today’s kings of the genre, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Kevin De Bruyne, are as good as any assisters English football has known and we’re still in the age of Lionel Messi, who, statisticians agree (while disputing the exact figure), has provided the most recorded assists in history.

We’re in an age of such skilful, creative football that maybe we should just enjoy the experience of the assist without getting hung up on its significance or terminology. We should be like Wayne Rooney (third in the Premier League’s all-time assists table) who wrote in a Sunday Times column: “I always wanted to score but always loved the game more than the individual stuff. I get more joy out of splitting a defence with a pass than any goals I’ve scored myself.”

OK, it’s unfair that a five-yard ball from Enrique measures the same on the scale as De Bruyne’s gorgeous through-ball for Erling Haaland’s second strike against West Ham United last Sunday but De Bruyne won’t care: he’s like Rooney was, a team player, a true creative – and for those types it’s enough to have created. They don’t need credit. It’s a state of mind.

In the same church was Zico, both a legendary scorer and playmaker for Brazil. In a Zen-like moment he once said: “Being the arrow and the bow came naturally to me.”

– The Sunday Times

Originally published as Jonathan Northcroft: Is modern football becoming overly fixated with assists?