On Crosses and Throughballs

This article originally appeared on MLSSoccer.com

Your team has possession in the final third; what is the most effective strategy?  Pumping in hopeful crosses or waiting to play that killer throughball?  And what can the relationship between these two variables (crosses and throughballs) tell us about each MLS team’s attacking strategy?

Soccer analyst/writer Michael Caley had an interesting article last summer that examined the relationship between shots created by crosses and shots created by throughballs.  Perhaps intuitive, he found that shots created by throughballs are converted at a much higher rate than those created by crosses.  Looking at 2014 MLS data provided by Opta, we can see that shots created by throughballs are converted at a rate almost double of those from crosses.

2014 MLS
	Shots	Goals	Conversion Rate
Crosses	1,526	201	13%
Throughballs	362	81	22%

This does not mean that good teams should completely ignore wide play.  The most effective attacking teams usually find a balance between the two.  The best measure of this is a team’s ratio of chances created by crosses to those created by throughballs.  The higher the number, the more reliant a team is on crosses to create chances (relative to throughballs).  This is last year’s MLS data (provided by Opta):

Team	Cross:Throughball Ratio
Chivas USA	10.2
San Jose Earthquakes	7.7
Colorado Rapids	7.5
Chicago Fire	7.1
Houston Dynamo	5.9
Philadelphia Union	5.4
Toronto FC	4.9
Columbus Crew	4.4
Real Salt Lake	4.1
Portland Timbers	4.1
L.A. Galaxy	4.1
DC United	4.0
Sporting Kansas City	4.0
New York Red Bulls	3.8
Seattle Sounders FC	3.3
FC Dallas	3.2
New England Rev.	3.1
Vancouver Whitecaps	2.8
Montreal Impact	1.8

Looking at the list, the tendency might be to view a high ratio as a bad thing with many of those team’s struggling to score goals.  However, the woeful Montreal Impact had the lowest ratio, so we cannot draw any definitive conclusions.  Nevertheless, looking at other leagues around the world, the more “attractive” teams tend to have low cross:throughball ratios.  See below for the high/low ratio teams from three major European leagues.  Remember, the higher the number the more reliant that team is on crosses.

 

Other Leagues Cross:Throughball (High/Low)
EPL	Stoke, 39.0	Arsenal, 2.4
Bundesliga	Stuttgart, 20.0	Dortmund, 3.2
La Liga	Levante, 40.5	Barcelona, 2.2

There are a couple possible reasons for this: throughballs may be preferable to crosses when you are facing a bunkering opponent and/or better teams may have the creative playmakers capable of pulling off such cutting passes.  Of course, the opposite may hold for “inferior” teams.  Incidentally, there is much more parity in MLS, so we do not see such wide spreads between the highest and lowest ratio teams.

Looking at current year MLS data, there are some interesting early results.  However, huge caveats here as the sample size on chances created by throughballs (and crosses) is very small and teams have played an inconsistent number of games. Teams are sorted by highest to lowest ratio.

Team	Cross	Throughball	Ratio
Columbus Crew	32	0	N/A
Houston Dynamo	11	0	N/A
Portland Timbers	22	1	22.0
San Jose Earthquakes	16	1	16.0
DC United	18	2	9.0
FC Dallas	20	3	6.7
L.A. Galaxy	26	4	6.5
Seattle Sounders FC	19	3	6.3
Real Salt Lake	12	2	6.0
Sporting Kansas City	24	4	6.0
Philadelphia Union	11	2	5.5
Colorado Rapids	11	2	5.5
Orlando City	13	3	4.3
Chicago Fire	12	3	4.0
Montreal Impact	4	1	4.0
New England Rev.	12	4	3.0
Vancouver Whitecaps	17	8	2.1
Toronto FC	8	4	2.0
New York Red Bulls	9	5	1.8
New York City FC	7	5	1.4

The Vancouver Whitecaps have done an excellent job at creating chances both from wide play and with throughballs, so it is unsurprising to see good early results for them.  In his first year at the helm of NYCFC, Jason Kreis’ team has almost completely eschewed crosses.  On the other end of the spectrum, the Columbus Crew are taking full advantage of new aerial toy Kei Kamara.  As for the CCL finalist Montreal Impact, perhaps the less said the better.