Declan Rice v Moisés Caicedo

Mohamed Salah versus Eden Hazard. Virgil van Dijk versus Nemanja Vidić. Moisés Caicedo versus Declan Rice. Not a single international break passes by without at least one of these debates flooding social media timelines.

This time, I have successfully resisted the urge to engage...on the timeline.

Instead I've written 2000 words on the issue. I hope, through this newsletter, to highlight the foolishness of this debate by viewing it through the lens of totally non-foolish and sensible animal-inspired metrics. Forgive me, for I am about to engage in discourse: not to provide a definitive answer, but to demonstrate how dumb the debate is in the first place. Maybe everyone will read this and log off for a bit? Of course not. But it won’t stop me from trying.

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Would you compare a crab and a horse? No. Crabs inhabit marine environments. Horses live on land. Crabs are decapods with pincers - I learned the scientific word for these organs is chelae. Cool. Horses are mammals with hooves - I knew that one. Crabs shuttle horizontally and are aggressive when provoked. Horses run in straight lines and bolt when scared. It would be ridiculous to compare them.

So why do we compare Caicedo (the crab) and Rice (the horse)?

[At this early point you may be wondering if Jake is okay, or if Twitter has totally fried his brain. Please stay with us. This is good, I promise - ed].

At the risk of sucking all fun out of a trivial issue, asking which player you would rather have in your team is a better question - but still requires a lot of nuance. Even posing which you'd rather build a team around is redundant, because you would pick different players to complement either. Football is a team sport and individual debate is irrelevant - but I know that's not fun.

Here’s my idea of fun. As a continuation of the zoomorphism, I’m going to translate the crab-like qualities of Caicedo and the horse-like qualities of Rice into a few different metrics and, eventually, Archetypes.

First up, habitat. For now, we'll assume that to mean the areas of the pitch a player habituates, instead of their team environment or tactics. That’s because I wanted to introduce another term I’ve borrowed from gaming to help distinguish player profiles: Area of Effect (AOE).

Looking at the volume of touches in each third alongside the proportion of touches taken in each should reveal a player's Area of Effect. The value of defining a player's AOE is that it helps understand which skills to compare between two players: in the modern game, a full-back and a centre-midfielder can share the same AOE, for example.

You would not compare a player that spends the most of their time in their own box with another that lives in the opposition's penalty area. You know they do different things. Admittedly, it becomes more difficult as players begin to converge into the centre of the pitch. In other words, midfielders are the most difficult to separate through this process. But it’s worth a try.

This graph plots Touches per 90 in all thirds of the pitch and inside each box. It also includes the percentage of total touches in each zone which I’ll refer to as Proximity.

Rice and Caicedo have a similar number of Touches per 90 but the distribution of them across the pitch is different. Caicedo is a relative outlier for the Defensive Third, but it’s not as extreme when looking at the Proximity to this area. However, in the Middle Third, he is notably above average for both substance and style. This part of the pitch is clearly Caicedo’s AOE.

Rice, however, is almost bang-on average for Proximity to each third. In fact, only five players in the dataset sit between -0.2 and 0.2 for Defensive, Middle and Attacking Third: Declan Rice, Elliot Anderson, Frank Onyeka, Mateus Fernandes and James Garner.

Of those five, only Rice and Anderson rank above average for Touches per 90. This combination of substance and style paints the picture of a dynamic, do-it-all box-to-box midfielder. In SCOUTED parlance, it illustrates the Ground Eater Archetype.

This name encapsulates a player’s ability to literally cover ground or metaphorically gobble up grass. Just like a horse. Everything pertains to long distances: lung-busting runs both with the ball, driving towards the opposition goal, and without it when recovering towards their own. Rice is constantly moving through the thirds. A Ground Eater’s AOE is the entire pitch.

Caicedo, in contrast - which does not mean better or worse - is a crabby, small-space menace. While Rice covers multiple thirds due to the verticality of his running, Caicedo shuttles across horizontally, making jabby challenges and punchy passes. This lends itself to a concentration of touches in a specific third.

By scuttling side-to-side, Caicedo ensures he doesn’t have to gallop up-and-down like a horse. Like Rice. That’s not a criticism, it’s smart. He knows his limits. Just as Rice can struggle against the most agile players.

In fact, Caicedo is such a rampant ball-winner that he does rank above average for Tackles in the Attacking Third. But his principal AOE remains the Middle Third. He also nips away the ball more often than Rice in most other defensive actions, including the composite metric of Tackles, Interceptions, Blocks, Ball Recoveries and Clearances.

Formations are becoming less instructive of how a team will set up due to the awareness, importance and diversity of in-possession and out-of-possession systems. If anything, the teamsheet is a better representation of what we’re likely to see OOP than IP. So, when analysing, scouting or comparing players, selecting players based purely on their position is becoming more problematic.

At least by looking at something like AOE, players that operate in similar areas of the pitch will likely have to solve similar problems, making a comparison fairer. But even these problems can be solved in different ways.

Take passing, for example.

The Ground Eater characteristics of Rice’s general coverage also apply to his passing to some extent. His ball-striking ability has transformed him into a set-piece demon, but it also augments his passing over larger distances, again touching on this emerging long-versus-short dynamic.

True Progressive Passes are all Progressive Passes excluding Passes into the Penalty Area, counting all “completed passes that move the ball towards the opponent's goal line at least 10 yards from its furthest point in the last six passes”. Both Rice and Caicedo rank above average for output, but Rice is moving towards the significant end of the spectrum; his 1.44 Score is the highest for either player across all metrics on this graph.

However, the real separation is based on the percentage of completed passes logged as True Progressive Passes. Caicedo dips slightly below average (-0.33), as expected from a more metronomic passer, while Rice ranks slightly above average (0.82).

This difference is also apparent when looking at the percentage of Caicedo’s passes as Short Passes and the percentage of Rice’s passes as Long Passes. Neither player represents a massive jump away from the average, but the difference between the two provides more clarity for our comparison.

It’s also worth highlighting that both players have similar Scores for Passes into the Final Third, Progressive Passing Distance and Progressive Distance per Pass. Both players are similarly effective at achieving progression via passing, yet both do so through different means.

After all, a long pass at an angle out wide could cover the same distance towards goal as a stabbed line-breaker straight through the middle. You can see this stylistic difference illustrated by the Distance per Pass metric.

So, it is fair to compare Rice and Caicedo’s ability to progress the ball with their passing as an isolated skill. But even that discussion pits two contrasting styles against each other.

You must also consider the context in which that effective ball progression is being achieved. For Caicedo, we already have knowledge that he is active in securing the ball before he plays it forward. Now let’s apply the same framework we did for passing, this time to each player’s carrying.

This separates the crabs from the horses. Despite Rice and Caicedo having a near-identical score for Carries - which correlates extremely closely to Touches - Rice distances himself from Caicedo in most other metrics.

Rice is notably above average for Distance and Progressive Carrying Distance, which speaks to the verticality of the Ground Eater style. The fact he is also above average for both Distance per Carry and Progressive Distance per Carry further illustrates that horse-like, galloping quality.

Here we see the clearest difference between our crab and our horse. It makes sense that Caicedo’s concentrated AOE in the middle of the pitch does not translate to significant Carrying output. Meanwhile, this is the metric by which players like Rice should be measured. Saying Rice is a more effective ball-carrier than Caicedo is like saying a horse is faster than a crab. It’s redundant.

Even if you argue that Rice and Caicedo share the primary responsibility of progressing the ball through the thirds, there are notable differences between the two when combing passing and carrying metrics into Progressive Actions.

Caicedo’s primary means of Progression is passing and he is effective at getting the ball into the final third. In some cases, his jabs will be the most efficient way to do so. But Rice has the option of booming switches or thundering gallops, combining to make him more effective and efficient at progressing the ball on the whole, just as Caicedo is more effective at winning it back. Look at Rice’s score for Progressive Actions per Touch.

Rice and Caicedo are different animals.

This is not a guide for how to be fun at parties or a hack for generating views and impressions on social media, but the question I ask myself before I start to compare two players is: could these two play together?

You can answer that by thinking about whether their skillsets would be complementary to one another and whether they share an AOE or on-pitch responsibilities.

But if you really want to compare two players, specifically Rice and Caicedo, there is only legitimate way to frame it. This is the only question I’ll allow.

Which team would win in a football match: 11 crabs or 11 horses?

Take that one to the pub this week.

Jake