FOOTBALL FORMATIONS AND THEIR EFFECTSJEFF WHEELER

Formations, formations, formations!

The dynamics of world football are ever-changing. With new managers come newideologies, and every once in a while they shakeup the very manner in which the game is played.One of the most recent footballing revolutionswas the resurgence of the three-defender backline.

Formations can be split up into three constituentparts: defenders, midfielders, and forwards.These partitions consist of 10 total players (thegoalie is disregarded). The figure on the rightdisplays three different types of formations:three-back, four-back, and five-back.

Datasets

Two datasets were used in the course of my analysis. One containedscores and team information (formations) for over 25,000 matches, and theother had almost 1,000,000 events from during matches. Combining thesedatasets, I set out to determine what, if anything, formations affect during amatch.

Effect on Results

§ Datasets

§ https://www.kaggle.com/hugomathien/soccer

§ https://www.kaggle.com/secareanualin/football-events

Effect on field positions

The increase in ratio for the three-defender formation could arise fromseveral different situations: an increase in stats for, a decrease in statsagainst, or a combination of the two. Analyzing the positions of the eventson the field could help gain insight. More events means more importantplays occurring.

I broke the field up into two halves (attacking/defending), with threesections each (left wing/center/right wing). This is visualized in thesection on datasets. The raw stats per game for each section werecalculated, and are shown below. Keep in mind that on the left of the redline, higher values are better, while on the right, the lower stats are.

The first metric I analyzed waswin percentage. This did notlead to very informativeresults. The five-back statisticsjump out at first, as thisformation has noticeably lowerand higher percentages forwins and losses, respectively.However, this is likely the dueto the combination of lowstatistics and the teams playingthis formation being ofrelatively low stature. From thispoint forward, the three- andfive-back data is combined, astheir differences from the four-back are nearly identical.

What is an event?One of the datasets containedalmost a million match events.What are those? From the data, anevent is defined as one of thefollowing: a shot attempt, a corner,a foul, a card, offside, or a penalty.In essence, an event is a momentduring the match in whichsomething interesting happens.

The figure on the right shows aheatmap of the total eventsFiorentina recorded while playingin the three-defender system. Theredder the patch, the more events.

Why a three-back?Playing three at the back is not a new idea. It waspopular during the first half of the 19th century,but had faded out of favor by the mid-60’s.However, since the late 2000’s, three-defenderformations have been on the comeback.

The idea of the three- or five-back formations istoo give the team an advantage on the wings andin the midfield. The wide-most players, referredto as “wing-backs” are expected to push up anddown the field and overrun the opposing team’soutside midfielders, while the extra man in themiddle can help control the center of the pitch.

Effect on stats

With the knowledge that formations do not have an obvious impact onresults, I wanted to explore the affect on style. With the data on events, Ianalyzed statistics on a match-to-match basis. I wanted to examine teamswith a high number of total events and a history of playing both formations.Juventus had the most events, but they have been dominant in the leagueover the last several seasons, so I also analyzed Fiorentina, who are fromthe same league but have finished slightly lower in the table.

Juventus• 129 three-back matches

• 58 four-back matches

• Won Serie A every year since 2012

Fiorentina

• 91 three-back matches

• 95 four-back matches

• Finished top 5 since 2013

Conclusion

Formations are vital to a manager’s gameplan, and can have a large effecton how a team plays. While it is not the case that a certain formation typewill guarantee a win, my analysis seems to show a slight shift in style ofplay from three-back to four-back. In the end, there are many, many factorsa manager must consider when filling out a team sheet, but differentformations can help a manager affect the positions of importance on thepitch to either bolster a tactical advantage for his side or exploit aweakness in the opposition.