⚽️ All eyes are on Kylian Mbappé this summer. Will he dominate at Euro 2024?
My Week in Sport(s): a football 'unicorn', the Celtics and State of Origin rugby league
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⚽️ Kylian Mbappé’s unique combination of skills
🏀 The Boston Celtics, living up to expectations
🏉 Emma Tonegato, running a perfect support line
⚽️ All eyes are on Kylian Mbappé this summer. Will he dominate at Euro 2024?
Euro 2024 will be a highly competitive, unpredictable tournament1 — like any knockout competition in a sport like men’s football, which draws talent from a wide range of nations across the world.
But it’s taking place as the balance of the men’s game in Europe more generally is threatening to tilt decisively: away from the continent, and towards England.
The 2024 edition of the industry report produced by the Financial Times for their annual ‘Business of Football’ summit is titled ‘The Wealth Gap in European Football’, and states things pretty plainly on its first page:
In this context, the signing of (arguably) the most famous men’s footballer in the world by (arguably) the most famous football club in the world is an important symbol.
By itself, Kylian Mbappé’s transfer to Real Madrid won’t significantly affect the structural disadvantages that football clubs in mainland Europe now deal with.
It does further consolidate the continent’s resources under the banner of one superclub, though — and should ensure that the Champions League retains a respectable level of international competitiveness2 for at least a few years more.
Mbappé is so special as a wide forward because he provides three valuable skills from a single spot in the line-up: elite ball progression, elite chance creation and elite finishing.
Only three players in the ‘Big Five’ men’s European leagues averaged more than 0.7 combined non-penalty expected goals and expected assisted goals per 90 minutes last season, as well as at least 20 combined progressive passes, receptions and carries.
Mbappé was one. The other two — Leroy Sané and Mohamed Salah — measure up well against the Frenchman when it comes to their involvement in chance creation and ball progression, but don’t finish their shots anywhere near as well as he does3.
As part of a Bayern Munich team which had the best attacking record in the Bundesliga, Sané actually created more xG through shots and potential assists than Mbappé did for PSG in Ligue 1 last season.
And they are just two of a number of elite wide forwards who will have major roles to play in their nations’ respective Euro 2024 campaigns.
If Mbappé is the benchmark at the position, how do some of the others compare? And might any outshine him over the next few weeks?
England’s Bukayo Saka is more involved in his team’s ball progression than any other forward in the ‘Big Five’ leagues; he’s still yet to generate elite shot volume — for himself or for others — over a full season in an Arsenal shirt, though.
Spain’s Lamine Yamal already plays an incredibly important role moving the ball up the field for Barcelona in club football, too.
The 16-year-old can be forgiven for not yet creating scoring chances as frequently as his much older peers at the position. His ability to carry the ball forward on the right wing — as
highlighted in a recent piece for The Athletic — is currently the most distinctive feature of his game:And — from the data we have available — neither Saka nor Yamal4 appear to possess anything like the efficiency with which Mbappé converts his shots into goals.
The public statistical record — for the 2017-18 season onwards, via FBref — shows that no other wide forward has such an extended track record of finishing as well as the French star does.
The only player who comes close on a per-shot basis is Rafael Leão, of AC Milan and Portugal. He has finished well above expectation — scoring at 1.2x his non-penalty expected goals — in around half the number of shots that Mbappé has taken in league play over this period.
But, unsurprisingly, Leão also falls well short on the other two pillars of Mbappé’s game: he created a volume of chances roughly equivalent to Saka’s output last year, while progressing the ball less frequently than any of the forwards highlighted here.
None of this means that, among this cohort of players, Mbappé is sure to shine brightest at Euro 2024. As he knows well himself from his last outing in the tournament, football is too volatile a sport for that:
I think you’d be pretty foolish to choose anyone else in the men’s game to build an international team around, though.
The shape of Mbappé’s production might change at Real Madrid in coming seasons, as he learns to play with other stars who possess similar strengths. But he’ll still be in familiar surroundings over the next few weeks: leading a France team that has been built around him into a major tournament as the consensus favourites.
The concept of a ‘unicorn’ in basketball is applied to a player who possesses a unique combination of size and skill.
In professional football — populated with fewer athletes whose freakish physical traits are immediately obvious — it might be a label better applied to players who bring a number of rare, important skills in a single package.
And there still aren’t many players at the top of the men’s game who you could argue have truly earned its application — other, that is, than Kylian Mbappé.
🏀 Run the Numbers
Some great sporting teams end up having their exploits discussed in slightly bewildering ways.
The Boston Celtics — who entered Game 4 of the NBA Finals last night5 with a 3-0 series lead — are one obvious current example of this phenomenon. They’ve been hearing about the supposed ease of their path to a title for the entirety of the postseason, but are now on the cusp of a dominant championship run.
I generally notice this distance between how the Celtics are talked about and how they are performing the morning after their games, when the great basketball stats website Cleaning the Glass sends out its daily recap email.
The site summarises the outcome of every NBA match-up from the previous night in one place, comparing each scoreline to their own predicted margin — which is based on their assessment of the teams’ skill levels, and other important context6.
From analysing their performances compared to these predictions in aggregate, we can see that the Celtics have basically played up to the high expectations that have been set for them in this edition of the Playoffs.
Through the third game of the Finals on Wednesday, they have been predicted to win their postseason games by an average margin of 9.6 points by Cleaning the Glass.
In reality, they have won these games by an average margin of 10.1 points — and beaten the site’s predicted spread in 10 games out of 15, including each of their first three Finals match-ups.
🏉 Watch the Games
Ahead of the deciding fixture on Thursday June 27th, I’ve been catching up on some highlights of the first two matches in the 2024 Women’s State of Origin series this week.
Last year’s edition was the first time the traditional series between New South Wales and Queensland had been contested over multiple games — and this year the number of fixtures has been extended further from two to three, matching the length of the men’s.
In Game 1 back in May, New South Wales took a lead in the opening minutes which they did not relinquish — and it was fullback Emma Tonegato who both started and ended the scoring sequence.
Tonegato first feeds the ball into a scrum inside her team’s 20-metre line, and continues to patrol the middle of the field after the Blues break up the right-hand side on their first phase of attack.
Having consolidated possession inside opposition territory, New South Wales are able to create a line break a few tackles later — and their fullback expertly anticipates the movement of one of her teammates in order to convert it into four points.
As Caitlan Johnston bursts through a gap in the Queensland defence, Tonegato is trailing the play outside the prop’s right shoulder. She immediately accelerates to beat the defenders scrambling towards the ball, but retains enough control over her movement to weave back inside Johnston’s line when some space appears.
After committing the last defender to a tackle, the prop frees her right hand to flip an offload back towards her left shoulder — where Tonegato is waiting to collect the ball, and speed across the try line.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday June 29th.
Jan Van Haaren’s aggregate of data-driven predictions shows that France, England, Portugal and Spain are all thought to have at least a 10% chance of winning the tournament — but no one has a higher average win probability than France’s 17%.
Since the 2017-18 season (when Real Madrid beat Liverpool to win the trophy) England has provided seven of the 14 finalists — as many as Spain (three), Germany (two), France (one) and Italy (one) combined.
Sané has finished each of the last three seasons with a non-penalty goals total lower than his non-penalty xG; Salah has done so in each of the last two seasons.
It’s obviously much too soon to make this judgement definitively about someone Yamal’s age — but it’s not a skill we should assume exists until we see statistical evidence for it, either.
For purely practical reasons, this edition of the newsletter was written before the result of the game was known!
Like who is playing at home, for example.