Picking 2023 winners: Mbappe, Haaland and… Lewis Dunk?

Everybody loves a good, completely arbitrary cut-off point, right? They can be useless, but sometimes they can, quite usefully, twist the lens through which we view something ever so slightly, just enough to reveal a new perspective. And so what better time to do that than the end of the calendar year?

While typically we constrain ourselves to the 38-game season model spanning across two calendar years, what if we take a different view? Rather than looking at this season and last season as two separate entities, what if we just let them bleed together and become one for the calendar year?

We know who won everything last season and who scored all the goals. We know who’s winning this season and scoring all the goals. But who won the most and who scored all the goals in 2023?

Let’s take a look at the defining players and teams of the past calendar year.

Touches

Looking back on 2023, we’ll start with the most basic thing in soccer: the ball. Who touched it the most?

Before we answer that, a quick reminder from Stats Perform as to what they talk about when they talk about touches: “A sum of all events where a player touches the ball, so excludes things like Aerial lost or Challenge lost.”

For this exercise, we’ll be looking at all competitive matches in the Stats Perform database, but only for teams in the Big Five top leagues in Europe. (The cutoff for the stats we’re using is the morning of Dec. 28.) It’s no surprise, then, that Manchester City lead the way in touch count, with 52,288. Second most in Europe goes to Real Madrid (50,733), while no other team is north of even 45,000.

As for players, the touch leader is, once again, not surprising: Manchester City’s midfield mainstay, Rodri, with 5,350.

The only other player to hit the 5,000 mark, though, is something of a surprise: Brighton’s 32-year-old center back Lewis Dunk:

What’s more: Dunk broke the 5,000-touch mark in 12 fewer matches than Rodri. While Brighton deserve all kinds of credit for their unparalleled excellence in recruitment, Dunk was with the club long before they started to play attractive, attacking soccer under Graham Potter first and now Roberto De Zerbi. Last season, Dunk took 3,521 total touches — nearly 1,000 touches more than he’d made in any prior season on record.

Passes into the final third

If we just counted passes, I’d probably be able to repeat the previous section by using find-and-replace with the words “touches” and “passes.” So rather than doing that, let’s just make our way down the possession chain. If touches are just a pure signifier of possession — in order to touch the ball, one must have the ball — then we’ve already established who has simply had the ball more than anyone this year.

However, at some point, you need to move the ball toward the goal. So, who has passed the ball into the final third the most? That would be Real Madrid, who have played 3,876 passes into the opposition’s defensive third this year. Here is a pretty-but-mostly-unintelligible graphic representation of that fact:

Madrid’s highest-usage ball-progressor is also Europe’s highest-usage ball-progressor from 2023: midfielder Toni Kroos.

A more useful graphic representation of that fact:

As you can see, the majority of Kroos’ passes come from the left-center of the field and fall into one of two buckets: short passes out to the left wing (usually to Vinícius Júnior) or long diagonals out to the right side sideline.

Passes into the penalty area

All right, so what do you do once you have the ball in the final third? You eventually push it into the penalty area.

An individual possession across the Big Five leagues in 2023 led to a goal 1.46% of the time. At the top, Man City led the way with 2.97% of their possessions leading to goals. But more to the point: When a possession reached the penalty area in 2023, it led to a goal 8.38% of the time. By moving the ball into the box, then, you’re drastically increasing your chances of scoring a goal.

Given these facts, City unsurprisingly completed passes into the penalty area more often than any other team (1,127). Surprisingly, however, Fiorentina finished with the second-most passes into the box (1,038), just slightly ahead of third-place Liverpool (1,035).

On the player side, 33-year-old fullback Kieran Trippier completed 275 passes into the box in 2023, while no other player across the Big Five leagues was above 235.

Although the right back has struggled on the defensive end for Newcastle over the past few months, he was arguably the single most important offensive player in the world in 2023. Not the best, mind you, but there’s no Newcastle in the Champions League without Trippier pinging the ball into the penalty area, over and over and over again.

Someone, of course, has to receive these passes. And the credit distribution starts to get murky once you start to think about the relationship here. Does the passer create the pass? Or can a pass only happen because of the run made by the receiver to get open?

The answer is somewhere in the middle, and no two passes are created equal. So, rather than getting too deep into the weeds, we’ll just say: If you’re playing a lot of passes into the penalty area, you’re probably a pretty good passer, and if you’re taking a lot of touches inside the penalty area, you’re probably pretty good at moving without the ball.

Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior led all players with 449 touches inside the penalty area in 2023. However, a good chunk of that comes from his unparalleled ability to carry the ball into the box on his own. Last season in LaLiga, Vini carried the ball into the box 140 times. No other player in Europe’s Big Five leagues even reached 90. I’d look for a big bounce-back for the Brazilian when he comes back from injury after New Year’s Day.

If Vini is the best ball carrier in the world by far, then the same is true for Kylian Mbappé when it comes to off-ball movement. If you’ve seen him play even once, you know this — just watch what happens to the structure of the opposition defense every time he starts to run — but here’s a stat to back it up: In 2023, Mbappé received 200 passes inside the penalty area. Next most came from Mohamed Salah of Liverpool with 152.

Real Madrid fans are constantly coming up with new champagne problems for themselves, and last summer’s was: How would Vinicius and Mbappé play together if the long-rumored Mbappe-to-Madrid move actually happened? Sure, they both seem most comfortable on the left wing, but the balance between a player who carries the ball into the box and another who receives passes inside of the box seems like it should work out just fine.

If arguably the best player in the world joins Real Madrid next summer, it’s going to be OK, Madridistas.

Goals

Mbappé, too, leads the way with a nice, round 200 shots attempted in 2023. However, he doesn’t have the most goals.

That instead would be … Al Nassr’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who continues to defy Father Time by prolonging his absurd attacking exploits well into his — OK, I can’t do this. Can we please stop acting like Ronaldo scoring 50-something goals in a terrible league that no one cared about a year ago is something worth celebrating? His team isn’t even in first place! It’s almost as if, even in Saudi Arabia — and as we saw in Italy and in England — Ronaldo’s one-dimensional goals-and-nothing-else approach totally unabalances his team while propping up his own individual statistics! What are we doing, people?!