Midfield Efficiency Ahead of Brugge

Running away in the league like Secretariat and Saturday's player performances left me pondering who I hope to see starting Wednesday...

With the league race looking as if it may be heading towards a Secretariat-at-the-1973-Belmont-Stakes-style run, the Champions League campaign becomes even more compelling from an analytical perspective.

With Celtic’s midfield having had an underwhelming performance at Tynecastle on Saturday, the composition of Celtic’s midfield for the starting lineup ahead of Wednesday’s massive game versus Club Brugge has become a renewed topic of debate.

I began the exercises laid out in this column without much in the way of strong convictions for this specific game, so let us dig into what I came up with to see if I could find reason(s) to become more convicted.

These metrics represent the average contribution per related action towards the chances of Celtic creating chances in domestic league games so far this season. The three categories break out those contributions into passes made, passes received, and ball progression via running in possession and taking defenders on via dribbles. I have also added a fourth metric averaging those three components.

We see what can be reasonably expected relative to the skew in Callum McGregor’s data versus that of the more attacking midfielders. This is an example of how data and various models often align with intuitive reasoning. A deeper laying midfielder like McGregor makes far more passes closer to his own goal, with the upside relative to chance creation relatively modest. In contrast, when passes are misplaced or dispossessed when running/dribbling within the defensive half or even third, the chances of opponents scoring can be materially impacted.