With the international matches set to start within a few days, and nothing much to talk about Inter Milan, now would be a perfect time to look back at our season and make the necessary changes required and what better to aid this than statistics.
This article is the first installment of the seven-part series and this one is going to be light with simple visualisations. I will move towards advanced statistics and visualisations in later parts of this series.
First we take a look at the most basic 4 categories, successful dribbles, key passes, shots and total passes per 90 minutes.
The first thing that stands out is the incredible number of passes that Inter Milan makes per game, an astounding 546.1 and Marcelo Brozovic is a key component to that, racking up over 90 passes per 90 minutes , he leads the Serie A in total passes completed and if the eye test wasn’t enough to tell you how Brozo is extremely essential to Inter’s buildup, this graphic should serve as a good replacement.
However, something that is certainly underwhelming is the extremely low amount of shots, dribbles and key passes that are generated for all the possession that we have. Mauro Icardi and Ivan Perisic are going through shooting slumps while Matteo Politano and Keita Balde aren’t given enough freedom to dribble through the opposition. I’m starting to feel that Luciano Spalletti is being slightly over-reliant on crosses and should give our players a bit more creative license.
Sure we have Icardi and Perisic to aim for, but this is getting a bit too much in my honest opinion. Juventus are another team that heavily cross the ball but they also rank high on shots per game, dribbles per game and key passes per game. You might argue that they have incredible players but I’d counter by saying we do as well, I’m just afraid are team is becoming too one-dimensional and something must be done to address it. We have only lost two games in the last two months and I’m really happy about that, but we must make sure it can continue.
This has effected Icardi’s underlying stats, he will always bang in the goals because he’s arguably among the best finishers in world football but we need to start seeing Icardi shoot a bit more and the only way that will happen is he is given more chances, Mauro is not going to help create chances, the team must create for him and maybe then we can start seeing 40 goal seasons which I’m sure Icardi is capable of.
Lastly, I made an interactive graphic to help you access the stats easily. Click the dropdown option to measure Inter on various metrics.
We rank second in average possession per game behind Juventus, third for most passes completed behind Juventus and Napoli and fourth in Pass accuracy. However this translates to 15th in dribbles per game, seventh in both shots and dribbles/game.
What do you think? Post your comments below! Forza Inter!