TPOEM EPL Player Awards 2012/13

I have stripped out players who played less than 500mins and provided some top/bottom 10s based on the TPOEM player ratings model I created earlier this year – calculated from matches in the Premier League only.

It’s a little biased, in more ways than one. The key bias I want to highlight before I start is that the stats for players in ‘busy’ teams are biased upwards – Liverpool and Spurs in particular were relatively active last season. When I say ‘active’ or ‘busy’ I mean that they exhibited high frequencies in certain actions – shots, tackles, ground duels, dribbles, etc. which improved the TPOEM ratings for a team’s players without necessarily providing the gains expected from the average team in terms of goals scored and points won. Hence TPOEM, and many other models to rate players by stats only, ought to be viewed a little critically – i.e. TPOEM suggests that Suarez was the best forward in the league last season, this is due in part to the fact that he attempted a very high proportion of ground duels, dribbles and shots. Calling him the ‘best’ forward is arguable – but there is little question about his results from this particular selection of binary stats.

I will highlight the key metrics I defined earlier in the season, and which players were in the top and bottom 10 for each category. Plus man of the match awards and even tallest/shortest players.

Ball Winning & Defending – this measure depends on things like clearances, tackles, interceptions and how successful the player was at completing each of those actions. Unsurprisingly the worst rated players are mostly attackers, but there are a couple of surprises in the ‘best’ list.

Passing & Ball Retention – this measure compares how often a player lost the ball in relation to his success rate of passing in different areas of the pitch. You can see the bias towards the top teams who retained the ball very well in the attacking areas.

Attacking – goals, shots, dribbles, chances created and a few others in this one. Sturridge did brilliantly after joining Liverpool (Ba’s rating in the table below represent his results at Newcastle only).

Discipline – this is effectively a measure of how often a player received yellow/red cards, plus fouling the opposition, minus the fouls he won. The best players are the ‘nice guys’ who seem to get fouled a lot without giving much back. The worst are those with a short temper who flirt with the possibility of a sending off too much for their own good.

Involvement – this measures how often a player is involved in various actions for his team, be it passing, tackling, duelling, shooting and so on. The players rated highest are all midfielders, whilst those rated ‘worst’ are generally central defenders/strikers who generally don’t touch the ball that often.

Man of the Match Awards – the team awards are simply the highest rated player on the team for a given match whilst the overall award is of course the ‘global’ dominant player in a match, for either team. Taarabt and Snodgrass get notable mentions here but Cazorla is the real winner.