The best, most talented soccer teams on the planet end up with a lot of the ball. Underdogs tend to spend a lot of time without it. After all, a lot of a team's general playing style is derived from necessity.
Each team is its own precious snowflake, however, slightly different than others. Last season, Luis Enrique's Paris Saint-Germain (65.4% possession rate) didn't share all that many similarities with Ange Postecoglou's Tottenham Hotspur (61.7%), just as Sean Dyche's Everton (40.4%) didn't look much like LaLiga underdogs Alavés (41.0%) or Cádiz (42.9%).
While the soccer world was influenced heavily by the success of Pep Guardiola and his positional, possession-heavy play at Manchester City in recent years, not everyone who hogs the ball plays a specific way. Some teams try to dominate both the ball and the entire pitch with intensity and heavy counterpressing. Others primarily use possession as a means of defense, keeping the ball as far away from their own goal as possible but taking few actual risks in possession.
Meanwhile, low-possession underdogs play in a variety of ways too. Some look to counter as aggressively as possible, while others do everything they can to simply keep the ball out of dangerous areas, even if it means creating little danger themselves. You can't lose if you don't allow a goal, after all!
On the eve of a new campaign, let's use last season's statistics to break teams from Europe's Big Five leagues -- the Premier League, Bundesliga, LaLiga, Serie A and Ligue 1 -- into little clusters of snowflakes. Who tried to dominate the ball, and who didn't? Who liked to introduce some chaos into the equation, and who avoided chaos at all costs?
While acknowledging that a team's 2023-24 stats won't automatically translate for 2024-25 because of a new manager or key new players, let's educate ourselves on all the different variations of possession and anti-possession ball we saw last year and will likely see this time around.
Consider this our handy guide going into the new season when it comes to figuring out what your team does or, if you're new to the sport, which style (and therefore which teams) might appeal most to you.
(Note: Teams that finished in the top five of their league are in bold. Neither teams that were relegated nor promoted from the second division were included. Also, each category has multiple "groups" of teams: Teams with more pronounced stats within the category are considered Group 1, and so on.)