Time to Tiki-Taka

Speaking to Bild this week, Giovanni Trapattoni is quoted criticising Pep’s style at Bayern Munich:

For me there’s too much possession. Tick, tack, tick, tack. Tuck, tuck, tuck. To and fro. With too little return. And after 27 minutes they shoot on the goal for the first time – that’s inefficient.

Tobi (@redrobbery on Twitter) posted some passes-per-shot numbers dispelling this myth, showing that FCB are actually pretty decent at getting regular shots on target:

I thought I’d add to this with some time-to-shot-for numbers because they are even more pronounced. Here’s the median TTSF for each team’s passing in the Champions League, that is, the average number of seconds it takes between a pass and a shot:

Team TTSF
Real Madrid 119
Bayer 04 Leverkusen 146
FC Bayern München 148
Atlético de Madrid 150
Juventus 167
Lyon 173
Galatasaray 174
Roma 175
Manchester City 181
Barcelona 188
Paris Saint-Germain 192
Olympiakos 193
Manchester United 199
VfL Wolfsburg 199
Benfica 201
FC Astana 210
Chelsea 220
Arsenal 222
FC Porto 223
Sevilla 224
Valencia CF 227
Borussia Mönchengladbach 237
Dinamo Zagreb 238
Shakhtar Donetsk 238
Dynamo Kyiv 253
KAA Gent 261
Zenit St Petersburg 267
CSKA Moscow 277
Maccabi Tel Aviv 284
PSV 315
Malmö FF 399
BATE Borisov 510

Borisov messing with my colour scheme there, but still – there you go: 2 minutes, 28 seconds, a mere factor of 10 out for Trapattoni. It’s a pretty reliable number for Bayern too, if you look here at the distributions of each team’s TTSF values for passes:

cl-pass-ttsf

Even at their absolute slowest, Pep’s team have only been about 750 seconds from tick, to tack, to shot.

Time to Tiki-Taka

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