More playing around with stylistic matching - if Naismith had pace

All data supplied by Football Whispers

I'm playing around with some new data at the moment.

It is a stylistic matching tool.

Yesterday I did a quick sanity test to see if it worked and broke the Manchester City team down into individuals, replaced them with their nearest stylistic match and put it back together again.

It seemed very reasonable with every suggestion looking as you would expect.

Today I'm going to stretch it further using the best players in the world and looking for the closest player match stylistically, the closest match in output terms, and the closest match 21 years old or younger.

I'll look at 2018/19 data concentrating on the big names.

Lionel Messi:

Closest match in style = Lorenzo Insigne
Closest match in output = Lorenzo Insigne
The U21 player = David Neres
Seems fair, Insigne is the type of player I associate with that Messi style.


Mohamed Salah

I've never scored a hat-trick against Chelsea, if only I slowed down.


Closest match in style = Dries Mertens
Closest match in output = Marko Arnautovic
The U21 player = Stephen Bergwjin
First questionable result with Arnautovic? More amusingly is the fact Steven Naismith appears as the 4th most similar player to Mohamed Salah in world football. Obviously his performance score is much lower, but I shall enjoy telling people it is a statistical fact that Salah is just Naismith with pace.

Cristiano Ronaldo

Closest match in style = Kyle Lafferty
Closest in output = Ciro Immobile
The U21 player = Luka Jovic (Oli Shaw of Hibs shows up well too)
Kyle Lafferty, the Enniskillen Ronaldo, at first you question the result, Ronaldo isn't some lumbering penalty box finisher, he is all stepovers and 40 yard overhead volleys? But maybe 2018/19 Ronaldo does profile like a target man.

Luca Modric

Closest match in style = Mateo Kovacic
Closest in output = Mateo Kovacic
The U21 player = Matteo Guendouzi
I keep hearing Guendouzi is showing up well statistically and this seems to show it is true.

Kylain Mbappe

Closest match in style = Marios Ogboe
Closest in output = Wissam Bin Yedder
The U21 player = Patrick Cutrone
This is where systems like this tend to suffer. If you took away the pace from Mbappe, and reduced his ability in all other areas by 30% maybe you do turn him into a not very prolific Greek-Nigerian striker playing in the SPL. Players like Mbappe (and Messi and Ronaldo) are hard to find stylistic match ups to because they just do everything well.

Eden Hazard

Closest match up in style = Christian Tello and Neymar
Closest in output = Neymar
The U21 player = David Neres
Tello seems an odd one to come out so closely matched? Other than that the list is made up of high dribbling, creative players.


Conclusion:

With the superstars it is harder to get proper style matches because they just do everything better and faster.
You end up with lots of slow, flair players coming up in the list whilst the skill of the top players is executing at pace.
The output score helps with this as you can also see how good they are at doing the skills.


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