Rodri's Passing Network

 The ball is rarely more than a few passes away from returning to its proper location at Rodri's feet as he sprays it left and right. In the previous season, he got more than 4,000 football touches in the Premier League. It was a record.


The game appears simple because of his metronomic usage of the ball. It's not. A weaker player would be appalled to be expected to do anything at all with the passes he receives since he is under so much pressure. He walks away after dropping a shoulder and holding off his marker.

Football now has numbers for everything, and some of them assist explain what the eye can see. Last season, Rodri played 2068 passes under pressure, which is 500 more than the next player on the list. He operates in confined areas.

Despite this, he rarely gives up the ball. We can determine the difficulty of the passes that players try based on the opposition's position by tracking data. Although Rodri's passes appear straightforward, there are so many that he ought to lose it frequently.


Rather, the data indicates that Rodri had the highest pass completion rate above expectations by 6.79 percentage points out of the 119 players who made over 1000 passes in the Premier League last season.
He overstates how ambitious his passing is. In terms of line-breaking passes, he was one of the Premier League's top five players. There was Rodri, sleuthing away beside those playmakers Martin Odegaard and the daring Bruno Fernandes.

Additionally, he was functioning in a different dimension than the others. Although it may appear to be only a stylistic oddity, the fact that he has many more chipped passes than any other player is informative in its own right. Rodri is able to go above or between. Each and every club in the bag.

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