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2015 Liverpool Player Rankings

Liverpool player rankings based on a with/without statistic

For the end-of-year installment of player analysis I decided to do something a little different. This time around I've compiled statistics for every player in the BPL and also for their teams when that player did not play. So for example we can look at how Liverpool performed with and without Steven Gerrard. Performance is defined as the difference between "goals for" and "goals against", or simply goal differential. All goals are not created equal though, so a further tweak is made to adjust for the quality of the competition as well as whether the game was being played home or away. In this way the goals are normalized so that a goal v Burnley at home is not worth as much as a goal scored on the road at Chelsea.

For the final number (or score if you prefer), I subtract the "with" goal differential from the "without" goal differential.

A positive number is good, a negative number is bad.

As with any statistical measurement, there are caveats.

The biggest of course is sample size - when you are talking about only 38 games there's a lot that can change in just one game. Stoke was an excellent example of that - six goals conceded in one match was roughly the equivalent of what Liverpool had conceded in any five road games, combined. Still, when you look at these numbers it's interesting that for the most part things sort out the way you would probably expect, but there are some big surprises.

The second caveat is closely related - how much a player plays can skew the numbers. A player who only played 90 minutes should be judged with caution, but also a player who plays every minute - he will have a score of 0.0 because there's no "without" data to compare! Doesn't mean the team isn't better off with him playing, we just don't have any data to do a meaningful comparison. With that in mind, the first chart below only shows players who played between 10% and 90% of all the available minutes. For completeness I've included the unfiltered chart below the summary.

So, without further delay, here are the 2015 Liverpool Player Rankings based on "With" and "Without" statistics!

player_rankings_summary_zpsnumj3jrk.0.jpg

The detailed chart with all players included:

player_rankings_all_zpswys7hnwr.0.jpg

One thing that's a little confusing about this chart is the "games with" and "games without" columns - you may be wondering why they don't add up to 38. Well it's because they are not quite labeled accurately..."games with" is really "number of games in which the player made an appearance" and "games without" is really "games in which the player did not play the full 90."

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