Dribbling in the Premier League: Attempts, completion rate, and who is best at defending

As a football fan there’s nothing quite like watching one of your players take on another and beat them. It gets you on your feet and wide eyed about what is possible. Conversely when you see your player left for dead, your heart skips a beat and your mind races to all the bad things that might now follow.

So using the unique PFF Premier League data for the 2022/23 season we’re going to delve into what the number say.

As a note in our system, a dribble is any time an attacking player instigates a move to get past a defender.

When you think of the most fancy of feet men in the Premier League, your mind will immediately turn to players like Wilfried Zaha, Allan Saint-Maximin and Adama Traore.  But which players have attempted the most?

So no surprise to see Zaha leading the way, though we are missing some familiar names. This boils down to opportunity as much as anything, and to determine opportunity there are two ways you can really use metrics to advance your narrative. The first of which is to look at how long a player is on the pitch, so you end up with a dribbles per 90 minute metric as below. To ensure sample size didn’t play too much of a role, we looked only at players who have played at least 500 minutes this year.

Here our familiar names return, and a couple of ones that perhaps wouldn’t be alto familiar. The Saints duo of Samuel Edozie and Kamaldeen Sulemana will surprise a few, and it would be interesting to see whether they would continue to be so adventurous with more minutes under their belts.

But there is an argument minutes on the field can be misleading. If you’re playing in a team that doesn’t have a lot of the ball, or potentially is defending a lead a lot you might not get the same level of opportunities to attack defenders. In this case it might be better to look at dribbles per possession, and we’ve set the limit here at a minimum of 400 possessions of the ball to determine the top 10.

And here we see the names that we (or at least me) would most likely expect to see. By this metric nobody tries to beat a defender more than the players on this list.

However taking on a player and beating them are two different things completely. The real key isn’t just having the confidence to take a defender on, but the ability to beat them. So in that respect the most interesting metric is dribble success percentage.

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