On the pitch is selfishness an entirely deplorable trait in a football player, or is it useful to a certain extent? In the Fink Tank, Daniel Finkelstein discussed some of our results on the topic but some aspects of our results were so exciting we wanted to share them on the blog also. I should stress that the results presented here are a first attempt at modelling this concept of selfishness and if we had more time develop the model and remove some of the underlying assumptions the results might change.
The first step was to define selfish behaviour. We came up with a ball hogging statistic for each player which refers to the number of passes the player attempted to pass to their own team over the total number of times during the match that they were in possession of the ball. So 0% indicates no ball-hogging whereas 100% would refer to only ball-hogging. It should be noted that the ball hogging is based purely on attempted passes and ignores whether the ball is being passed up or down the pitch and whether or not the pass is successful. Below is a list showing the worst ball-hogging forwards.
