On July 23, 1966, in a World Cup quarterfinal in front of 40,248 at Everton‘s Goodison Park, Portugal and North Korea played one of the most frantic and celebrated matches in soccer history. Led by the brilliant Eusebio, playing in his only World Cup, the Portuguese had torched Hungary, Bulgaria and a disappointing Brazil by a combined 9-2 to advance to the knockout rounds, while North Korea had finished a surprising second in their group, losing badly to the Soviet Union and drawing with Chile before shocking Italy, 1-0, in Middlesbrough and eliminating one of the tournament favorites.
The North Koreans continued riding the wave of underdog energy early on. In a quick transition during the first minute of the game, Im Seung-Hwi fired off a shot from long range; it was blocked, but landed at the feet of Pak Seung-Zin, who scored from a closer distance. They kept going. In the 22nd minute, Portugal keeper Costa Pereira misplayed a cross, which quickly led to a tap-in for Lee Dong-Woon and a 2-0 lead. Two minutes later, it was 3-0.
However, the upstarts would quickly run out of gas. From the 27th minute on, Portugal attempted 22 shots to North Korea’s four. Eusebio scored an incredible four goals in 33 minutes to give the favorites the lead, and Jose Augusto finished off a 5-3 win with a short-range finish in the 80th minute. Probably the best team in the tournament, the Portuguese fell victim to a pair of Bobby Charlton strikes and lost to the English hosts, and eventual champions, 2-1 in the semis.
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Thanks to some brilliant archival work, you can watch extended highlights of the match on FIFA’s website. (You’ll also quickly come to realize how far ahead of his time Eusebio really was.) You can read more about it here, and thanks to the work of the data collectors at Stats Perform, we can dive into the data, too.
The teams attempted 47 combined shots, 43% of which were on target and 51% of which were from inside the box.
The shots were worth a combined 4.4 xG (3.4 for Portugal, 1.0 for North Korea), or 0.09 per shot.
Portugal had possession 57% of the time, a little bit above its tournament average of 52%.
Each team racked up 125 possessions. Portugal began its possessions an average of 38.6 meters up the pitch, while North Korea averaged 26.1 meters.
The teams attempted 795 total passes (Portugal 442, North Korea 353) and completed 72% of them (78% for Portugal, 65% for North Korea). Portugal attempted 48 crosses to North Korea’s 10; both teams completed about 30% of them.
Portugal started 7% of its possessions in the attacking third and finished 57% of them there. North Korea: 2% and 30%, respectively.
Fifty-five years and about four months later, in front of 39,641 at the same venue, Liverpool beat Everton 4-1. The game featured far fewer shot attempts (16 for Liverpool, eight for the underdog Toffees), but 58% of them came from inside the box, and they were worth a combined 4.0 xG — 0.17 per shot, nearly double that of Portugal-North Korea. The teams attempted 868 passes, 9% more than Portugal-North Korea, and completed 76%. Liverpool completed 82% of its passes, while dominating 68% of possession. The teams attempted only 33 combined crosses and completed just 18% of them.
The teams each possessed the ball 116 times, a dramatic departure from the Premier League’s season average of just 93.2. Liverpool began its possessions 38.5 meters up the pitch, starting 10% of them in the attacking third and finishing 38% of them there; Everton: 36.3 meters, 6% starting in the attacking third and 27% ending there.
Statistics tie a sport’s present to its past. It gives us a language with which to communicate, evaluate and debate. It also provides a level of context that nothing else can.
A sport like baseball has been blessed with both this inherent understanding and an incredibly measurable sport. Basketball, too, albeit to a lesser degree. Soccer, however, is far less measurable and got a terribly late start. Stats Perform has data like this for major soccer leagues going back a bit more than a decade, but if you want to look up the stats from, say, the 1994-95 Premier League season or Liverpool’s 1977 European Cup win over Borussia Monchengladbach, good luck.
Stats Perform did, however, provide us with a small miracle by logging World Cups, starting with England 1966. Through 14 tournaments, undertaken every four years, we have glimpses into how soccer has evolved and changed shape over nearly six decades. It may not be as much as we would want in a perfect world, but it is to be celebrated.
So how has the game evolved? Casual soccer fans probably already know a lot of the general answers — the game is more possession- and passing-based, teams take fewer long-range shots, etc. — but being able to tie anecdotal trends to actual data is a gift. Let’s take advantage of it.
Thanks to Stats Perform’s work, we have stats for both how that 1974 Netherlands team actually played and how much influence it may have had on how the rest of the world played.
The Dutch enjoyed 57% possession for the tournament: more than any team in 1966 or 1970, but not dramatically so. Their 4.3 passes per possession were fourth-highest in the tournament, and their 15.8% of possessions with 9-plus passes was second behind the West Germans. They had a lot of solo possessions (7.6%, sixth-highest), which doesn’t fit the ball-domination style, and you could make the case that West Germany was the more patient overall team, although the Dutch ended up with 58% possession in the final, due at least in part to trailing for the entire second half. Their interchangeable nature didn’t really show up in their team stats — it’s probably noteworthy that all 11 of their regulars in the tournament ended up with between 230 and 580 touches, and eight of them attempted at least nine shots — but their passing volume numbers were not off the charts by any means.
Still, via Dutch influence or someone else’s, the game had entered a more passing-friendly stage within a few years. It didn’t show up in the 1978 data, but it had by 1982.
The 1970, 1974 and 1978 tournaments averaged 3.7 to 3.8 passes per possession per team, and aside from a weird dip in 2002 — when 23 of 32 teams averaged under four, including both finalists (Brazil at 3.7, Germany at 3.9) — every tournament from 1982 to 2010 averaged between 4.1 and 4.3. But following Spain‘s 2010 win (and the club dominance of Barcelona), that average ticked up to 4.6 in 2014 and 5.1 in 2018, when seven teams averaged over 6.0 and Spain averaged 10.0 while advancing to the round of 16 but suffering an upset to the host Russians.
A team ahead of its time: 1986 Morocco
While possession is often tied to talent advantages in the current game (and money advantages in the club game), this Moroccan team controlled 56% of the possession (most in the tournament) and averaged 5.5 passes per possession (second-most). With a squad composed heavily of players on the AS FAR team that had won the 1985 African Champions League, they basically played keep-away, dominating the ball but ranking just 17th of 24 teams in shots per possession and 23rd in xG per shot.
They won a tough Group F with scoreless draws against England and Poland and a 3-1 win over Portugal, and they controlled 60% of possession in their round-of-16 match against West Germany. The game nearly went to extra time, but Lothar Matthaus’ goal in the 88th minute won it for the Germans.
Behold, the power of the back-pass. While there is a loose correlation between pass-heavy possessions and a slower tempo, soccer’s overall tempo plummeted in the 1980s, in part because of a specific type of pass. The sport’s history books will always reference 1992’s banning of the back-pass — in which a teammate would pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, who could pick it up with his hands and stall for a solid amount of time — as one of the most impactful and viewer-friendly rule changes any sport has ever seen. The 1990 World Cup was notorious for its general unwatchability, and the back-pass was regarded as a major reason why.
Without the average of passes per possession per team changing, average possessions leaped by more than 17%, from 90.3 in 1990 to 106.0 in 1994, the highest average since the manic 1966 tournament. That’s quite an impact.
