Playing with numbers in La Liga

After 25 La Liga games, I wondered which players were outstanding from an attacking point of view.

Therefore I went to Whoscored.com, got the stats for all the players - more than 400 -, shook it up and came up with the following graphs.
I only selected players with more than 1000 minutes played so the results are representative.

The most obvious one was the goals and assists per 90 minutes.



The more on the right, the more they score. The higher the player, the more assists they give.
Obviously, top players are on the top-right section, and there is no surprise on finding there Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Not-so-obvious was finding Suárez as best "assister" of La Liga. Cheryshev from Villarreal ranks just behind, with amost the same figure as Leo Messi.

On the scoring aspect, Griezmann from Atlético gets a nice figure as well, just behind Neymar.

But that graph was not saying everything.
After all, scoring or not often depends on few centimeters, and assisting or not depends on the same, but from one of your teammate. So instead of goals and assists, I decided to check key passes - i.e. passes leading to a shot - and shots, per 90 minutes. That would give an idea of the impact on the game, although not always on the final result.



Unsuprisingly, Leo and CR7 are still playing in their own dimension.
But new names appear.

Nolito from Celta has tremendous data.
James from Madrid, Sarabia from Getafe and Susaeta from Athletic Club are the best key passers of La Liga.

Shooting-wise, Vietto from Villarreal and Agirretxe from Real Sociedad shoots more than 4 times per 90 minutes, showing real attacking activity.

Vietto is very young, only 21 year old. So I decided to redo the graphs only with players under 22.

First goals and assists per 90 minutes.

Isco is a no-brainer, already playing with the Spanish team.
Vietto is different from the other youngsters, scoring almost twice as the second classified Leo Baptistao from Rayo Vallecano.

Paco Alcácer - Valencia-, Fede Cartabia - Córdoba -,  Moi Gómez - Villarreal - and Denis Suárez - Sevilla - are the young players assisting and scoring as well.

I did the same exercise as for the whole Liga players and produced the graph for key passes and shots per 90 minutes.

Sarabia from Getafe adds his name to the ones we have just seen above.

Therefore, only according to stats, these are the names of the not so-obvious players that are outstanding in the Spanish League:

• Cheryshev
• Vietto
• Nolito
• Sarabia
• Susaeta
• Agirretxe

And these are the names of who are likely to dominate La Liga - or other leagues - in the future:

• Isco
• Vietto
• Cartabia
• Sarabia
• Denis Suárez
• Moi Gómez
• Paco Alcácer
• Leo Baptistao

Naturally, this is only based on numbers.
But let's keep an eye on all those players and see how they develop !