Being talked of as a long ball side is never a positive.
While some teams might use the tactic positively, playing to their strengths, there
is a sense that long ball football is often reductive,
dull, and ineffective at the highest level.
Long ball football often results in losing possession,
as short, simple passes make it far easier to retain the ball and longer passes give
greater time to intercept or are aerial, allowing
defenders the chance to compete.
This season, only two teams have so far had 60% average possession or more: Manchester
City and Spurs.
In the bottom half of the table after six games, only two sides have 50% or
more average possession: Southampton, who look like a top half side without a striker,
and Bournemouth, who look like they think they’re
a top half side but don’t have the personnel.
Similarly, passing success percentages show that every side below sixth, excluding
Southampton, has a successful pass completion percentage of less than 80%; the Saints are
80.5% and, it should be noted, Bournemouth again are 79.5% – their style is certainly
progressive, it just isn’t working yet.
If we keep the teams in their table order and look at passes, it’s clear that, generally,
better teams complete more passes.
It’s exactly what you would expect to see, as sides dominate
the ball by moving it around, probing for weaknesses, and are less likely to surrender
the initiative to their opposition.
Indeed, the graph of league position versus total passes per game looks like this:
There’s a clear downward trend: as league position decreases, so does total passes per
game, with spikes for Southampton and, towards the bottom of the graph, Bournemouth
and Everton.​ But what about long ball passes?
Again, keeping the list of teams in table order, we can see
that the percentage of total passes per game that are categorised as long balls varies,
from Manchester City’s 6.9% to the highest, Burnley
with 22.4% and West Brom with 22.5%.
This is not exactly a surprise, given the sides
concerned.
What is also noticeable is that again, Southampton and Bournemouth aside, once you’re
out of the top six, the percentage of long balls played goes up significantly.
The average for the top six sides is 10.2% of passes being long balls.
The average for the rest is 17.9%.
Remove Southampton and Bournemouth and that average increases to 18.7%.
But, and here’s where it gets really interesting, the fewer long balls a team plays, the more
accurately they tend to do it.
That’s right – teams who don’t play a long ball style pass the
ball long better than those who actively do.
The most accurate side for long ball football is
Manchester City, who have played only 46.1 long balls per game.
But of those, 64.6% are accurate, 10% better than the next most successful
team by percentage, Spurs.
Indeed, only three sides play fewer than 60 long balls
per game, Manchester United, Manchester City, and Arsenal, and those three all do so with
50% or higher success, far better than most teams.
This is probably because those teams choose the long ball option more carefully because
it’s counter to their normal style, or they have
better all-round passers who can do all things well.
It’s also worth noting that only Spurs and West Ham play more than 60 long balls per
game with a greater than 50% accuracy.
West Ham, in fact, are the only real anomaly here.
They play more long balls than any side, but they
also do it more accurately than all but three teams.
So, if there’s a genuine long ball side in the league, then, it’s West Ham, followed
by Burnley.
But West Ham do it well or, at least, successfully.
Most other teams should reduce the number of long balls they play – if they
did, they might pass long in more appropriate situations and not lose the ball as often.