Update: Are goal-kicks and long balls useless exercises?
Were goal kicks useless in the 2018 FIFA world cup as well? This is a follow-up piece on the goal-kick post that I wrote a couple of months ago. I must admit though that this serves more as a filler than as a genuine attempt at validating the findings reported in the previous post. Blame it on writer’s block. Data on the FIFA 2018 world cup games are once again from the publicly accessible whoscored.com website ( https://www.whoscored.com ). I repeated the same analyses that I had done previously. In short, I asked the following questions: 1. Are long balls common? 2. Do they adversely affect possession? 3. Does possession impact goal-scoring ability? 4. Do long balls adversely impact goal-scoring ability? As in the 2014 world cup, long balls are common, with one long ball played for every 6 short passes. Long ball accuracy was poorer in 2018 (under 50%) compared to 58% in 2014. This was probably because there were more teams this year who were not ...