The numbers behind Raphinha's dominance

Sorry for today’s later and shorter newsletter, my internet was out for most of yesterday afternoon and for a couple hours this morning. Turns out that if you move to a rural part of the United States because it’s extremely inexpensive, you end up getting what you pay for.

Both of today’s UEFA Champions League ties have heavy favorites, with the richer and more experienced teams having racked up multi-goal leads in the first leg. I don’t think there’s a ton of analysis to be done about the potential outcomes of those games. So instead, I just want to celebrate Raphinha, an extremely unlikely Ballon d’Or candidate. Back in August, Barcelona were publicly shopping him to English and Saudi clubs in the press, and seemed quite annoyed that he didn’t want to leave.

Raphinha currently leads the Champions League in both goals (12) and assists (11). His La Liga numbers aren’t quite as gaudy — 13 and 8 in way more minutes — but still good enough that he’s earned the right to be compared to Mohamed Salah and Ousmane Dembele come awards season.

All his per-90s from shot value, to volume, to dribbling and passing, are outstanding.

But, you might be saying, Raphinha is on one of the best teams in the world, playing a style that helps with stat-padding. But it’s pretty nuts to look at him alongside his Barca peers.

xG is probably the metric that’s least kind to him, even though he’s been 98th percentile among wingers/10s in CL. There’s definitely been a pretty insane amount of finishing luck involved with Raphinha’s CL goal tally; he’s overperforming it by more than double.

When it comes to everything else, it’s clear how nuts this dude’s performances have been. How the heck is he completely lapping the likes of Pedri and Lamine Yamal for xG assisted?

xG Chain is a metric that attributes the value of a chance to everyone involved in the move, including the shooter. Even when Yamal and Pedri are getting equal credit for the passes before the shot and assist, Raphinha ends up as the player most involved in Barca’s high xG chances.

OBV measures the impact of all on-ball actions and how much they add to the probability of their team scoring or assisting, and Raphinha’s top of that too.

And finally, the one that shows how perfect Raphinha is for Hansi Flick’s system and the role he’s asked to play in it, line breaking passes received in the final third. He’s so good at timing his runs between the lines and in behind the defense.

Lamine Yamal deserves all the hype he gets; I think he is the best 17-year-old player I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it’ll be very long before he surpasses Raphinha’s impact on Barcelona. But this season, Raphinha has been Barca’s most impactful player, and perhaps the entire world’s as well. Not bad for a guy the Blaugrana wanted to bin off last summer.

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