Innovating possession metrics with the Possession Utilisation Score

We can do better than the traditional possession metric.

I’ve been watching many games in the last few weeks. Tournament football, league football and pre-season. What annoys me is that how we address data in the media. Things like most saves or most passes, it does really annoy me. And, that’s because these statistics don’t really tell you what is happening on the pitch. There is no context and that’s why I want to look at a particular one: possession.

In traditional possession metrics we simple look at who has the ball, count the total and calculate percentages of that. Simple. It does account for volume and it might tell you about what happened on the pitch, but not so much what happened or more importantly, what did the teams do with the ball.

I’m well aware that the metric of Field Tilt has been quite popular as of late. Field tilt is the number of touches in the oppositions divided by the total touches by both teams in the final third, and make a percentage out of that. It measures territorial dominance in the final third. I quite like that metric, but it’s quite specific on the final third and I want to look slightly broader.

Possession Utilisation Score

So here it is, I’m introducing you to the Possession Utilisation Score!

What does the PUS look at it? It looks more closely to ball possession, but mostly focuses on what teams do with the ball in the attacking phase of the game.

PUS looks at per possession efficiency, meaning that it looks at qualitative, meaningful values of that possession. For that I use 4 different components: