People love Andrea Pirlo. They can never forget his effortless moves and inch-perfect passes. Since he retired in 2017, fans had been searching for a new Pirlo. That journey was supposed to end when they found Sandro Tonali:
(picture from Goal.com)
He is the perfect Pirlo clone; he plays for Brescia, where Pirlo established himself. He even has the same hairdo:
But the fans were soon disappointed; first, Pirlo announced that Frenkie de Jong “reminds me of myself.”
Then Tonali came out and called himself “a mix of Gennaro Gattuso and Pirlo”:
Finally, Brescia’s head coach Eugenio Corini chipped in, “Tonali will be the new Daniele De Rossi and not another Andrea Pirlo.”
None of them is a bad model, but Tonali doesn’t resemble any of those players yet.
Tonali is not Pirlo
Pirlo was the ultimate playmaker. Because he needed to direct the game, he always had the ball in his career; at Juventus, Pirlo used at least 13% of the total number of his team’s passes in all but one season, more than 90% of the qualified central midfielders since 2009/10. In contrast, Tonali uses only 10% of his team’s total passes, placing him in the 52nd percentile.Â
Playmaking is more than just playing with the ball; heavy ball usage is the consequence of the function of the playmaker. It doesn’t measure directly playmaking. A good playmaker needs to facilitate ball passage between his teammates and not just to hog it. Â
One way to quantify that attribute is to treat the passes between the players as a network of connections and measure the “hubness”, how much a player facilitates the connection between other players, of the playmaker. In network topology analysis, betweenness quantifies the number of times a node (player) acts as a bridge along the shortest path between two other nodes (click here to read the discussion of betweenness and here to read how betweenness is calculated using Tore Opsahi’s tnet package in R). The higher the betweenness the player has the more connections that player bridges.Â
In fact, betweenness and ball usage don’t share a lot of overlap, meaning betweenness measures something that ball usage doesn’t capture:
(the R2 of betweenness and pass% (team’s total) for all qualified midfielders in Serie A is ~0.25, meaning only 25% of the variation of betweenness is due to the variation of ball usage)
In Juventus, Pirlo’s betweenness ranges between 8 and 19, two to five times higher than that of Tonali:
(The blue node represents the playmaker for each team. The red connection represents the most over-represented connection for each team)
Pirlo’s importance in playmaking is also illustrated by the fact that most of the over-represented pass connections of his teams went through him. In contrast, Tonali doesn’t make as much play as Pirlo did; his betweenness is similar to that of Pirlo’s successors, Claudio Marchisio and Miralem Pjanic. Even though they are still the hub in the midfield, the pass networks of their teams are more decentralized than those of Pirlo. Their teammates don’t always pass through them to connect to other players.Â
His inspiration to become Gattuso also hasn’t materialized; Gattuso was a hound dog in the midfield. He racked up more than 18% and 12% of his team’s total defensive challenges and interceptions, placing him in the 95th and 75th percentile, respectively. Tonali contributes only about 10% in both categories, placing him in the 26th to 40th percentile. He isn’t the defensive anchor Gattuso once was.
Compared to De Rossi, Tonali’s ball usage still lacks behind:
Tonali just doesn’t mirror other great Italian midfielders yet.Â
Tonali’s unique playing style
The activities of a players comprise more than just how many passes or defensive actions one contributes; if we quantify the playing style of a player by calculating the frequency of the 12 actions (five defensive actions and seven offensive actions) they do in the game, we can generate an actions characteristic profile for each player and calculate the similarity between them by Euclidean distance:Â
Again, Tonali’s profile is different from those of other legendary Italian midfielders: De Rossi (65th among 168 qualified midfielders), Gattuso (138th), Marchisio (108th), and Pirlo (95th). His closest match is Cristian Ledesma, who was the deep-lying central midfield playmaker for Lazio between 2006 to 2015.
Tonali’s profile is distinct even when compared to those of his closest matches; he makes far too few short passes. He also makes a lot of blocks, which is typical for a defender. In fact, the Euclidean distance of Tonali-Ledesma pair is 4.44, more than two times over the average distance of every other closest pair (2.19). Putting it in a context, the difference between Tonali and his closest match is similar to that of an average player and his 70th closest match.Â
Among the top Tonali’s matches, Luca Cigarini, Panagiotis Tachsidis, Ivan Radovanovic, and Francesco Lodi have spent significant amounts of time as the deepest central midfielder in a 4-3-1-2, the same formation Brescia play this season (until they have switched to a 3-5-2 in the last two games). In fact, Corini’s tactics define Tonali’s game.
Offensively Brescia don’t need Tonali to make play:
Corini sets up his attack on the flank through quick transitions. The central forward looks to move to the flank or drop to the midfield so that the attacking central midfielder – Nikolas Spalek – or the wide central midfielder – Dimitri Bisoli, Daniele Dessena, or Romulo – can attack the resultant space:
The side midfielder is key to Brescia’s offense. He either directly attacks the flank or pulls a defender away to open a passing lane toward the center:
Defensively, Brescia also aim to confront the opponent on the flank:
They defend like most Italian sides that look to engage the opponent close to the half-line. The forward presses from the center to force the ball to the flank. The attacking central midfielder guards the middle zone and cuts off any passing lane toward the center. They force the ball to move only along the flank for the fullback or the wide central midfielder to press the ball handler:
Once they can force the ball outside, even if they don’t attack the ball handler, they can still cut off any forward passing lane and push the ball backward.
In both defensive and offensive phases, Brescia’s tactics don’t require Tonali’s direct interaction with the ball, explaining his low ball usage and defensive action participation.Â
Tonali is a transition wizard
Limiting Tonali’s involvement doesn’t mean Corini hasn’t found a way to use his talent:
Unlike the typical playmaker of a strong team, Tonali makes lots of long vertical forward passes without too many horizontal ones. In contrast, the most famous playmakers like De Rossi and Pirlo play a lot of horizontal switching passes. They have to. Their teams always dominate and need to penetrate a deep defending block. The horizontal switching pass becomes a necessary means to find the open channel.Â
Decomposing the frequency of passes into distinct classes based on distance and angle, we can generate a passing profile for each player and calculate the similarity between them using the Euclidean distance (like above):
Simone Missiroli’s passing profile is most similar to that of Tonali. Note that Tachsidis, who is one of Tonali’s most similar players by the actions characteristic, also has the fourth most similar passing profile to Tonali’s.Â
Like the actions characteristic profiling, Tonali’s passing profile doesn’t look very similar to that of his closest match. The problem isn’t in the method to calculate similarity since we can reliably identify the closest match for other players such as Pirlo:
Again, Tonali’s unique style of play separates him from his peers. It manifests not only in what he does with the ball but also in how he directs the ball.Â
Tonali plays so many vertical forward passes to serve one of Brescia’s critical needs: transition.Â
They aren’t exactly a heavy-weight. Brescia spend more time defending than attacking. As their deepest midfielder, Tonali is looking for the quickest transition from the defense to the offense:
Tonali does this job exceptionally well:
He converts >30% of his team’s successful defensive challenges into successful passes to his teammate, placing him in the 90th percentile among 500 qualified midfielders since 2009/10. He is a transition machine.Â
Tonali has all the necessary tools to do well in transition; he is a great dribbler: among 125 qualified midfielders since 2009/10, Tonali has the highest dribble success rate (85%). He is also extremely strong, making him excellent in the defense-to-offense transition. That combination of physical and technical attributes is something even Pirlo or Gattuso would have dreamed of.
Tonali has a lot of work to do
But if Tonali wants to elevates his game to a higher level, he needs to improve his defense. His marking is bad:
Brescia’s defensive scheme requires the wide central midfielder to move out of the position to engage the ball handler. Tonali often hesitates to move out of the area in front of the center back, making it difficult for his team to control the resultant space.Â
Just blatantly ignoring – or worse, being unaware of – the opponent’s player in those situations will never work in a more competitive squad. As technical as players in Tonali’s position are, they also need to act as the first buffer for the defenders; Pjanic is Juventus’ indisputed starter because not only of his amazing passing skill but also of his ability to hold up defensively (he is massively underrated in this area).Â
Tonali is certainly talented, but no big club is going to start a central midfielder just for making transitional plays. It’s not his fault that Brescia’s system has limited what he can do, but he is also extremely raw. It will take quite some time for him to hone his game.Â
