What is creativity? If you have to ask, you can't afford it. At least, you'll never understand it. And you certainly won't be able to measure it. To try to define "creativity" is to completely misunderstand the idea. You know it when you see it, but you can't predict it and you definitely can't explain it. Or ... can you?
More so than in any other sport, "creativity" is the key concept at the heart of soccer. In short, you have to "create" a goal. Unlike in baseball, football or basketball, there are no kind of timing or infrastructural mechanisms that are driving one team to attack and the other one to defend, with the pendulum constantly bouncing back and forth between the two sides.
Outside of dead balls, there are no "plays," either. For a team to score, the players have to collectively decide that they want the ball, then they have to collectively figure out how to get the ball, then they have to collectively decide that it's time to move the ball toward the goal, then one individual has to decide that it's time to try to kick or head the ball into the goal.
There is some kind of animating, collective creative instinct within all that, but the movements themselves are often driven by one creative individual. Historically, he wore the No. 10 shirt, but now it might be a No. 17 or No. 66.
We know who the creators are; we literally have a stat for that called "chances created." But not all creators are creative. Bayern Munich's Thomas Muller has been putting in 10-plus-assist seasons for more than a decade, but he's perhaps the least creative great creator of the 21st Century.
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So what do we talk about when we talk about creativity?
A group of researchers in Belgium set up a machine-learning algorithm to answer the question. And while the phrase "machine-learning algorithm" seems like it was created with the sole purpose of destroying the concept of creativity altogether, their work exposes some hidden creatives, highlights how rare the likes of Manchester City's Kevin De Bruyne or Liverpool's Trent Alexander-Arnold are, and raises a bunch of new questions about how creativity manifests itself across a 90-minute match.
Shaka Hislop still has reservations about Arsenal's defence despite their impressive attacking play in their 3-1 win vs. Tottenham.
So, what is a creative pass?
"Creativity is a prototypical 'I know when I see it'" concept," Pieter Robberechts and Jesse Davis, a pair of researchers at the Belgian university KU Leuven, said. "Thus, because it conveys a feeling, it is hard to define. Therefore, we were curious if we could capture this using data."
Davis leads a team of computer-science researchers who focus mainly on studying patterns and quantifying what happens on a soccer field. Along with Maaike van Roy, he and Robberechts published a paper for the recent Statsbomb analytics conference titled "un-xPass: Measuring Soccer Player's Creativity."
For the paper, they were given access to Statsbomb's 360 data, which takes a freeze-frame snapshot of all the players near the ball whenever an action is recorded. Normally, this kind of event data is just recorded by location -- Mateo Kovacic's pass started here and ended here; Rodri intercepted the ball there, etc. -- but the 360 data contextualizes for off-ball player positioning. This is especially important for the work these researchers wanted to do.
At its most general level, they wanted to determine which players played the most unexpected passes. If you controlled for a number of situational factors, which players frequently played passes that were different from what everyone else did in similar scenarios?
One issue: By this definition, a striker who got the ball at the top of the opposition box, turned around and launched a pass back to his keeper would be considered "creative." That wouldn't work, so they factored in a second level: They wanted to find players who played unexpected passes that also increased their team's chances of scoring compared to the average pass. With information about where a player's teammates and opponents were, they were able to more accurately lump together similar situations and more accurately determine how valuable each pass was, too.
What is the platonic ideal of a creative pass, then? How about this one (start from 1:55) from De Bruyne last season, in injury time of a 2-2 draw with Liverpool at the Etihad.
First: OK, he's obviously going to play it to Phil Foden. Then: OK, he's playing it to Foden. Finally: Oh, wow, how did he see that angle to Riyad Mahrez?
Who are the most creative passers?
Given what you just saw, it should be no surprise that the researchers rated De Bruyne as the most creative passer per 90 minutes for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 Premier League seasons. The data only included the top 10 teams in the league in each season, but that doesn't make the No. 2 player on the list any less surprising: Brighton wing-back Tariq Lamptey.
After a lights-out start to the 2020-21 season, Lamptey looked destined for an England call-up, only to rupture a hamstring halfway through the campaign. He never reestablished himself as a first-choice starter under Graham Potter -- and has since switched his national team allegiance to Ghana -- but perhaps a newfound reliance on Lamptey's creative passing will be how new Brighton manager Roberto De Zerbi tries to evolve the team in his image.
"We knew that Lamptey's play was lauded last year but we were not expecting him to be so highly rated," the researchers said. "He is very close to De Bruyne and there is a reasonable gap to Alexander-Arnold in third place."
Clustered near Alexander-Arnold were Raphinha, then of Leeds, and Chelsea's Hakim Ziyech. It's likely not a coincidence that Chelsea's attacking play has seemed so predictable during the long stretches when Ziyech hasn't featured. It's also not surprising that a coach such as Thomas Tuchel, who prioritizes control over all else, didn't take to him. Given Potter's sporadic usage of Lamptey while in charge of Brighton, it doesn't seem likely that things will get much better for Ziyech now the manager is at Chelsea, either.
The researchers also found that there tended to be an inverse relationship between the number of passes attempted and the overall creativity rating, but the top five all paired high degrees of creativity with relatively high usage rates. After Ziyech, there's another drop-off, but the rest of the top 10 was, in order: Arsenal's Martin Odegaard, Tottenham's Lucas Moura, Tottenham's Harry Kane, Arsenal's Bukayo Saka and Chelsea's Mason Mount.
How does creativity work?
Apparently, it works the same way it always does -- no matter the minute, no matter the score.
"We had a lot of debates about how to best capture what constitutes the 'typical' pass," Robberechts and Davis said. "Initially, we expected that there would be multiple 'typical' passes in many game states. However, we found that most players tend to pass the ball to almost the exact same location in a similar game state, especially when there is a high-value pass option."
Interestingly, this goes against most of what we know about how the score affects the game.
When teams take the lead, they tend to play more defensively than they should. And frequently, teams only attack as aggressively as they should once they go behind. Someone I know who works as a consultant to a number of European clubs once told me that he thinks this is the biggest inefficiency in the sport. If a team could somehow convince the players -- through psychology, coaching, contract bonuses, you name it -- to continue to attack once they're winning or before they're losing, they'd have a massive advantage on all of their opponents.
What's also interesting is where creativity seems like it comes from.
"While not player-related, we were quite surprised about the asymmetry between the left and right side with players operating on the right wing being far more creative than those on the left," Robberechts and David said. "We are curious if this is really the case or simply a result of the fact that we only analyzed a small number of teams."
All the amateur psychologists out there should feel free to attribute this to the old right-brain, left-brain dichotomy. Right-sided players were more creative at every position, including right center-back and right central midfield. My best guess, however, is that when it comes to attackers, the right-sided players actually tend to be left-footed, and since there are fewer left-footed players across the player pool, the ones who squeeze through all the selection filters and make it to the highest level almost, by definition, have to be unique.
Of course, for there to be a creative passer, there has to be a receiver. While the Leuven researchers didn't specifically track the receivers of the most creative passes, they did track which duos produced the most creative passes between each other -- and this might shine a bit of a light into Liverpool's early-season struggles.
Atop the list, by a wide margin, was Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane. Not only were the two players incredibly productive while on the field together, but they were productive in a unique way. That passes the eye test, too: Think of all the high-speed attacks between the two when at Liverpool, where one player fired in a waist-high ball to the other, they exchanged a couple of passes, and suddenly one of them was in on goal all alone. The Mane-Jordan Henderson pairing was also in the top 10 of the most creative duos, while Tottenham's Kane and Son Heung-Min ranked second.
Now all of this "measuring creativity" does sound a bit like trying to hold a floating bubble. It's there for you to look at it, not control, and once you try to touch it, it disappears. But when I asked Davis and Robberechts about what they learned from their work, they came up with another definition of creativity that I'd never thought of before.
"When you work on a project like this there is always a renewed appreciation for the skill level and vision of certain players," they said. "You can watch some passing clips over and over again, and still enjoy them even though you know the outcome."
Anyone else wanna go watch that De Bruyne pass again?