Barcelona’s metronome — Xavi
Xavi’s greatness, Well documented
Amongst few, He’s resented
Amongst Many, He’s respected
His departure Could have been extended
The board’s antics Could have been prevented
His lack of a successor left the fans disoriented
He was one of the greatest despite not being multi-talented
Rather than be the jack of all trades, he was the master of a field which he reinvented.
What made Xavi unique?
We all know that Xavi was not the most physically gifted, or the most versatile dribbler. What made him stand out was his passing ability. But that would be a misconception. What made Xavi unique was not his passing technique, but his decision making and off the ball movement (more on that later).
Every midfielder who considers himself an excellent passer must have developed the following skills :
- Vision — The ability to locate players
- Accuracy — The ability to consistently make accurate passes to the player
With enough practice, these two skills can be polished within a few years, most of the top midfielders have these skills. But that’s where it gets interesting.
Decision Making — The ability to pick out the right man, the ability to slow down or speed up the tempo of the side via his passing ability.
Off-Ball Movement / Positioning — The ability to move into pockets of space to help a player under pressure to find an easy pass or pull an opposition player out of his position and upset the team’s structure.
Now you could work on your long passing, develop a good long shot and free-kick and then as the years progress, with experience you have gained defensive awareness and now you’re a regista like Pirlo.
You could be blessed with physical abilities and then develop a strong defensive game and now you’re a defensive box to box midfielder like N’golo Kante.
Or you could be extremely versatile and work equally on all your skills, be called a jack of all trades and therefore perform a multitude of roles for your team during the course of the match like a Luka Modric.
Now coming back to Xavi, he developed an impeccable ability to control the game with his passing. His decision making and off the ball ability is the best I have ever seen and only Luka comes close here.
What made Xavi unique was not his passing technique, but his decision making: how he used his passes to control the rhythm of a match and decide the optimal direction of attack.
In this modern era of faster, more physical football, where stopping for a couple seconds means having a defender breathing on your neck, offensive playmakers are often forced to pass quickly and vertically without any time to ponder whether that pass was the optimal one. In such a context, Xavi’s genius was having the desire AND technical skills — his exquisite first touch control and his trademark 360 turn — to pause amidst this chaos and ensure that he made the optimal choice. He knew exactly when to slow down and build up attacks more carefully, and when to speed up to take advantage of an opening in the opposition’s defence. Peak Xavi essentially became a one-man attacking build up that linked up with his teammates all over the pitch and slowly moved his team forward until they had completely taken over their opponent’s half.
Statistical Look
In a modern era, we have moved on from statistics like Goals and assists and key passes, these statistics are often misleading and therefore we now compare players based on XG, XA and others. I’m sure you have heard of these before, and know that even then those stats are biased towards forwards.
So, enter a new way to measure players, via their in-game movements, a study conducted by an MIT student (I left that study as a footnote, please go through it, it’s highly informative)
Most of the analysis and evaluation of the players’ performance do not contain much information on the physical aspect of the game, creating a blindspot in performance analysis.We propose a novel method to solve this issue by deriving movement characteristics of soccer players. We use event-based datasets from data provider companies covering 50+ soccer leagues allowing us to analyze the movement profiles of potentially tens of thousands of players without any major investment.
This study focused on 3 players for the 2012/13 season, the players were Xavi, Messi and Ronaldo
As you can see, Ronaldo’s movements are very predictable, cutting in from the left, running large distances down the wing.
Messi, on the other hand, is less predictable, but we can still say that he only has 6 ways to attack the opposition goal and prefers to stay on the right-hand side of the field.
Now, Xavi’s movement map, on the other hand, cannot be deciphered. See how unique he is? The closest players to Xavi were Thiago Alcantara, Khedira and Luka Modric (2012/13 season).
Now let me reveal a scary fact, despite being this unique, Xavi maintained an incredible consistency in his movement patterns and thus somehow managed more than 95–100 passes a game.
Xavi’s consistency — All his games are extremely similar. Only twice did Xavi’s in-game movements differ more than 40% of his average movements, and that was due to the fact that he came off the bench in those games.
Xavi’s replacement?
The question should be rephrased as to whether Barcelona wants to replace Xavi at all or want to accept that the modern game is changing and then try to build the team in a different way.
That’s the underlying problem when a team is built around generational talents like Messi, Xavi or Ronaldo. Once they retire, it is extremely hard to find a replacement for above-mentioned players. Barca has spent Millions to find a replacement for Xavi, Man Utd have failed to find suitable replacements for their famous centre-back pairing of Ferdinand and Vidic and spent ridiculous amounts on players like Bailly and Lindelof.
So in my opinion, the best way forward is to embrace the fact that the game is changing and it close to impossible to find another Xavi again and therefore, focus on a new system.
But, if sticking with the Cruyff system or the Pep system is a non-negotiable aspect of the Barcelona tradition, then Barca better find a replacement for Xavi as fast as possible.
The most viable option right now would be Arthur, a player who they purchased from Gremio and looks really promising.
Footnotes:
Originally published at football101.quora.com.
