⚽️ Barça Femení still dominate — but might be moving away from their defining style
My Week in Sport(s) ⚽️ 🏏 ⛳️ 🏀 🏈
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: ⚽️ Barça Femení, 🏏 Australia, ⛳️ Rory McIlroy, 🏀 Breanna Stewart and 🏈 the Kansas City Chiefs.
⚽️ Barça Femení still dominate — but might be moving away from their defining style
Barça Femení losing in the league for the first time in almost two years wasn’t the most shocking thing to happen in the world of professional sport last weekend — but they’ve been so dominant for so long that it might have been close.
So far this season — after head coach Jonatan Giráldez left for the NWSL, and former assistant Pere Romeu took his place — their overall performance level has remained impressive. Even in their 1-2 loss to Levante on Saturday, they did not play poorly: they generated 47 shots (worth 4.8 xG) to the visitors’ six (worth 1.2). Watching the game, though, I was struck by how they seemed unable to regularly create the sort of high-quality chances in possession that defined their style of play under Giráldez.
FBref data for Liga F allows us to explore this in more detail. We can define ‘shots in possession’ as those taken with either foot which follow two open-play passes; this excludes shots from set-pieces, turnovers and rebounds, and those which follow a player carrying the ball forward into space — an action which can alter the structure of the defence. Barça have taken around 15 of these shots per game in the last two seasons — but the distribution of those attempts has now altered in an interesting way.
They’re taking more than twice as many shots in possession from further than 18 yards out than they did in 2022-23, and creating fewer of these shots from inside 18 yards than they did last season. Barça still have the highest average shot quality of any Liga F team, so there’s no need to panic. But it’s a clear trend away from the creation of high-quality possession chances — and towards a reliance on shot volume — even after they added an elite penalty-area striker to their squad last summer.
The defending champions aren’t in any real domestic jeopardy. As the Champions League quarter-final draw is made today, however, their status as favourites for that title is less secure than it was at the start of the season. With Keira Walsh transferring to Chelsea and Patri out with an injury, Romeu will also have to reshuffle his midfield in coming weeks. And — leaving the result to one side — their process last weekend showed how the style of this Barça team has subtly changed under Romeu, too.
🏏 Australia’s exceptional spin bowling powered their recent sweep of the Women’s Ashes
Australia’s dominant 16-0 sweep of the recent Women’s Ashes series generated a lot of negative press for the visiting England team — and not too much of it was focused on the specifics of their play on the field.
But looking across the three formats in which they competed — ODIs, T20Is and a test match — it’s clear where the home side excelled: their spin bowling. England’s batters struggled immensely against Australia’s spinners in all three formats, averaging fewer than 13 runs per dismissal in each case. The tourists bowled more spin than Australia did in the ODIs and T20Is, and it was more effective than their own pace bowling — but their spinners’ returns still paled in comparison to Australia’s.
For Australia, this is really an Alana King story: the leg-spinner played every game in the series and claimed 23 of England’s 80 available wickets. (No one else on either side claimed more than 16.) For England, it’s the continuation of a known weakness. In 2023, head coach Jon Lewis said: “People will watch us play spin and they’ll go, ‘right, okay, we think we can exploit this team in that area.’” This series has proven him right — and shown that, at the top level of sport, identifying a problem is the easy bit.
What else I learned last week
⛳️ At 35 years old, Rory McIlroy is still unmatched off the tee
Rory McIlroy’s longevity is what makes him stand above almost all of his peers. Data Golf’s new ‘DG Points’ grading system — which builds on Strokes Gained, but “[rewards] high finishes and wins disproportionately” — is another way to show this.
At just 35 years old, he’s already fourth in their career DG Points list; the next-best player under 40 is Jason Day in 32nd. And McIlroy is showing no signs of slowing down: last week at Pebble Beach, he comfortably outdrove everyone else in the field on his way to a first win of 2025. He’s not quite as long as he was at his peak, but ‘Rory 4.0’ is more accurate than the other top drivers on tour. A defining feature of this period of his career may well be “a wiser, more conservative strategy off the tee”.
🏀 Breanna Stewart is struggling from three-point range at Unrivaled
With 18 games played in Unrivaled’s inaugural season, we can begin to understand which skills the WNBA players taking part will be developing. One obvious place to start is an examination of where the shots they’re taking are coming from.
During the 2024 WNBA season, around 34% of all shot attempts came from three-point range. With more space inside the arc at Unrivaled, that rate has fallen to just under 30% of shot attempts. New York Liberty forward — and league co-founder — Breanna Stewart has seen a roughly similar drop in her three-point attempt rate: from 27% in WNBA play last year to just 24%. She’s still struggling with her shot, too: Stewart has only drained three of her 23 attempts from range so far at Unrivaled.
🏈 Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs get a real — but small — playoff boost
The Kansas City Chiefs will play in a third straight Super Bowl this Sunday, despite another underwhelming regular season. Should the Philadelphia Eagles be optimistic about their chances — or do the Chiefs really hold something back for the playoffs?
Here’s one way to assess that question. On 14 occasions under head coach Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes, the Chiefs have faced an NFL franchise in a postseason match-up who they also played during that regular season. On average, after adjusting for the impact of home-field advantage, they’ve improved their margin in regulation against the same opposition by 2.7 points per game in the postseason — a boost roughly equivalent to the impact of an extra field goal in their favour.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday February 14th.
SB relegated to a literal footnote! Enjoying the content a lot