Corinthians won the Brazilian league ten days ago for the second time in the last two seasons. After taking the lead of the table on August 16th at the 19th fixture, they became champions at the 35th of 38 fixtures on November 19th. Corinthians has undoubtedly the best offense (70 goals for) and the best defense (30 goals against) in the league. The second best goal difference in the league has Atlético Mineiro, also second on the table, with 16. Corinthians is, therefore, doing something great in the country of football, right? Yes! Maybe.
I used Who Scored? data to compare Corinthians performance within the Brazilian league and with the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and with its respective leaders at the moment (November 29th). Using the values of each category, I ranked Corinthians in the other leagues and compared how the leaders are doing it.
Manchester City, Barcelona and Bayern München tend to be first and second best on each category on their local leagues. Corinthians is bad ranked when it comes to shots per game, but they assist more than anyone else and their shots come on target very well. Different from the other teams, Corinthians is not extremely ball possession-oriented and, in this sense, seems to be extremely efficient in the game construction phase, making good decisions and finding the best options. The first place on rating should reflect this efficiency.
On the picture below, from Footstats, we can see on the left the total amount of completed passes and, on the right, the wrong passes.
Corinthians is the third team with the most right passes made, behind the two teams with the highest ball possession percentages. Although they present also a great number of wrong passes, when looking further to crosses, long passes and dribbles, the Brazilian champions present very low numbers in all of these criteria, tending to a consistent style of play, looking for a collectiv game with short passes.
According to Who Scored?, Bayern München has five of the best ten players in league. Manchester City, one. Barcelona, all the best three. Corinthians has two and, according to Footstats, only one. The local media has been reporting the strength of the roster, where no one is described as the star or being untouchable.
The numbers point to this direction, as Corinthians don’t present a dominant performance in every single parameter as the other table leaders. They did, however, for sure an extremely good season and gave their opponents no chances. The problem lies on the metrics, which aren’t sensible enough to point out their strengths and weaknesses.
Do you have any idea on how we could better measure and describe Corinthians performance?
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Tactical Numbers 