Ange Postecoglou thinks that the assist is a ‘useless statistic’ – is he right?

Football can be a divisive sport, but one thing most can agree on is the value of setting up a team-mate for a goal.

Not so for Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou. When asked about Dane Scarlett’s assist against Ipswich Town this week, he initially praised the young forward’s character, before launching into a dismissive speech about the metric.

“As an aside, I gotta say, the assist is the most useless statistic in world football. Seriously, it could fall off your backside, fall to somebody on the halfway line who scores and it’s an assist, so it doesn’t impress me,” the Spurs manager said.

Judging by Postecoglou’s tone, this distaste for assists is a long-standing gripe, and a routine question about a 20-year-old backup striker gave him the perfect chance to air his frustration.

Postecoglou is not a lone warrior in this crusade against counting creation. Former Ballon d’Or winner Michael Owen echoed similar thoughts in a debate on Twitter with Cesc Fabregas in 2021.

Owen belittled the skill required to pull off an assist, tweeting, “Literally one in 10 goals are genuine assists.” For his part, Fabregas spearheaded the assist resistance, pointing out that they often demand creativity and skill in pressured, tight spaces.

This minor squabble distills the essence of the debate: the role of luck. For Postecoglou and Owen, chance outweighs skill when it comes to assists — the act of goalscoring is where the real ability lies, assists are simply a byproduct.

The flaw in this rationale is that it applies as much to finishing chances as it does to creating them. Football is littered with lucky goals, even at the elite level. Kylian Mbappe’s shinned volley in Real Madrid’s 3-2 victory against Manchester City was so miscued that its sliced trajectory wrong-footed Ederson and floated into the net.

Judging Mbappe on this action alone, you might think he lacks the coordination and ball-striking ability of an elite striker. Yet we have an overwhelming body of evidence — his 263 domestic and Champions League goals — that proves otherwise.

Statistics only take on meaning once we aggregate them. Any individual goal is subject to the random whims of an errant deflection, a fortunate bobble, or a goalkeeping howler. But luck is not a repeatable skill. Over time, the roulette wheel evens out, and the best goalscorers rise to the top.

Why shouldn’t the same principle apply to assists? If assists are truly meaningless, then why are assist leaderboards consistently dominated by the game’s most renowned creative assets?

This is evident when we look at the 20 instances of a player recording 15 or more assists in a single Premier League campaign. Many on this list are not known for their prolific goalscoring, yet most are considered among the greatest creative forces the league has ever seen, and their assist numbers help highlight that.

What’s striking is the variety of assists we associate with these players, from David Beckham’s inch-perfect crosses and set-piece deliveries to Fabregas’ delicate through balls, their extraordinary vision consistently unlocked the league’s toughest defences. These varied passes all shared a common goal: to maximise the recipient’s chances of scoring. They were deliberate in their ambition, and not some short sideways pass aimed at recycling possession.

The ability to compare Beckham’s output in the 1990s with contemporary players is another of the metric’s strengths. Though the word ‘assist’ only entered the football lexicon after the 1994 World Cup, the value of creating goals has been recognised as long as the game has been played. Data company Opta has used the same criteria for an assist for the entirety of the Premier League, from John Williams’ goal for Coventry against Middlesbrough on August 15, 1992 (assist: Stewart Robson), through to the present day.

Assist tallies also help identify those rare dual-threat players who excel at creating and dispatching chances. Many of this season’s top assist providers at each Premier League club fall into this category, including Mohamed Salah, Bukayo Saka, Son Heung-min, Cole Palmer, Bruno Fernandes and Jarrod Bowen.

Postecoglou became so caught up in his theory that he appeared to momentarily forget that he was being asked about a former academy player’s progress after a series of difficult loan spells at Portsmouth, Ipswich and Oxford United. Reining it in, the Tottenham manager quickly added the caveat, “but Dane’s assist on the weekend was a good one”.

Yet Scarlett’s assist was exactly the type that Postecoglou had dismissed just seconds earlier. His flicked header against Ipswich dropped to Dejan Kulusevski just past the halfway line before the Swede proceeded to dribble to the edge of the box, cut inside, and curl a precise effort past Alex Palmer. Kulusevski had essentially created and finished the chance by himself, but both he and Scarlett were credited with a goal contribution.

Dane Scarlett: assisting the discourse (Paul Harding/Getty Images)

Fortunately, analytics help us distinguish between assists based on the quality of the chance created. The expected assist (xA) metric provides that insight. Put simply, xA measures the expected goals (xG) value of the shot that is assisted, ranging from zero (no chance of an assist) and one (a certain assist).

Scarlett’s assist was given an xA of virtually zero, conforming with our intuition that a headed pass halfway up the pitch hardly constitutes a clear-cut chance. By using xA, we can judge playmakers by the quality of their chance creation, rather than relying on raw assist counts.

Unlike traditional assists, this doesn’t penalise playmakers for wasteful finishing by those they set up. In Liverpool’s 2-2 draw away at Aston Villa, Dominik Szoboszlai laid on a square ball to Darwin Nunez, only for the Uruguayan to somehow blaze over the bar. While real-world events deprived Szoboszlai of a real assist, xA ensured that his creativity didn’t go unnoticed in the data archives.

Dominik Szoboszlai’s chance of an assist disappears at Villa Park as Darwin Nunez blazes over (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

The players topping the xA leaderboards are largely the same as those leading in conventional assists. This comes as no surprise — since the 2019-20 season, player assist totals and xA have shown a 93 per cent correlation across Europe’s top four leagues, proof that prolific goal providers consistently create meaningful chances.

Useless stats do exist in football. Take historical head-to-head records — regularly mentioned before kick-off, despite having no bearing on the present. Some considered Tottenham’s strong home record against Manchester City a potential advantage, but this ignores how football teams evolve. Of the 22 players that started their 2021 meeting at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — a game Spurs won 1-0 — only three remain at their respective clubs.

But assists are not a useless statistic. Like goals, some are fortunate, others are moments of pure invention. They are a strong signifier of creativity and deserve our respect, despite what Postecoglou and others may suggest.

(Top photo: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)