I just found out today Possession stats from Opta aren't even based on how long a team holds the ball for. It's basically number of passes completed / total number of completed passes. So basically a team who makes loads of short passes have a far higher possession number than a team that doesn't. Explains why City have loads of possessions against other teams.
Even "how long a team holds the ball for" is not really what in data analytics is called "actionable data" (ie something you can use to objectively measure performance or problems) . Shots attempted / on target is probably the simplest measure of a team, but even that needs to be qualified with other data.
How is that possession? Are you sure about this, as it makes absolutely no sense? Why do we frequently see possession and then number of passes per team shortly after, if they're essentially the same stat?
Yes i was shocked too when i heard it today hence i thought i'd see how many people knew that. Essentially you could hog the ball all game but if you don't play that many passes your possession stat won't be that high. Opta use this way as @rdbd has mentioned because it's objective and doesn't require someone timing when someone is in "possession". Guess that's why possession is always shown as a percentage stat rather than a "time in possession" stat. The official calc is "completed passes / total completed passes by both teams" to calculate possession.
One team kicks off, makes ten passes and then loses the ball to a man who runs around with it for the rest of the 90 minutes. The first team has more possession...
It does explain why I sometimes watch a match, see the possession at the end and think, "That can't be right..." Chelsea's possession stats are going to be insane this season, based purely on Jorginho alone.
Then their measure is due to cost/laziness/ego reasons on their part, and not some desire to get an accurate measure of a teams' ball possession during a game.
Explains how we in our title winning season had such low possession stats when it seemed that we had the ball more then the opposition sometimes - quite a few of our players had good dribbling stats but low number of passes.
Or the "How many Premier League titles have you won" stat, thats quite interesting when you compare Leicester and Spurs.... p.s It never ceases to amaze me how badly Spurs fans took, and are still taking, The Foxes PL title win
Number of Premier League titles is the most interesting stat It is hilarious how you are still bitter
What is even sadder is that as time goes on all that will be remembered is they finished 3rd behind Arsenal and 11 points behind us.
