Since debuting for Atlanta United in 2017, Julian Gressel has been among MLS’ most versatile and consistent two-way players. That work has often come as an overlapping right wingback sending in crosses while providing teammates with a capable give-and-go outlet.
When he was traded to the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2022, however, his role changed: he tucked into head coach Vanni Sartini’s midfield to bring that passing acumen into the heart of the field. It took some of the pressure off “working-class designated player” Ryan Gauld, while Brian White benefited from Gressel and Gauld’s combined service for a Best XI-caliber season up top. Gressel was seemingly a perfect fit for the new-look Whitecaps. However, being isolated in British Columbia away from family and friends on the East Coast stifled talks of a contract extension.
The Columbus Crew acted quickly, acquiring Gressel in exchange for up to $850,000 of allocation money. Although he had flourished in a central role with the Whitecaps, head coach Wilfried Nancy viewed him as an upgrade in his previous home on the right flank. Columbus lost just one of his 10 regular season starts, helping the team to a third-in-the-East finish. Gressel didn’t miss a beat out wide, slotting in on the right in a more advanced role than he previously played for Atlanta and D.C. United.
It was a savvy acquisition, costing the team league-specific allocation money during a window where they needed to swiftly replace Lucas Zelarayan after Al-Fateh of the Saudi Pro League came in with a hefty offer to pry away the 2020 MLS Cup MVP. Having already moved within MLS on multiple occasions, Gressel is adept at adapting.
Though the more commonly tracked stats involve on-ball actions, a zoomed-out look at just how Gressel’s involvement changed, including his off-ball movement to better assess the parts of the field he most commonly occupied, shows a more complete picture of his value.
Practically tethered to the touchline, Gressel led Columbus by creating 26 chances after the regular season resumed following the Leagues Cup. Thirteen of those chances came from the run of play, and he only trailed Cucho Hernández among Crew regulars, averaging 32.99 touches in the attacking third per 90 minutes.
A good player returned to his preferred role on a capable attacking team and, surprise surprise, he did well.
No matter how good his off-ball work is, what Gressel (or any player) does with the ball at his feet is inevitably more scrutinized. Still, the work off the ball helps give options for potentially beneficial actions, whether it’s to get the ball or just to drag an opponent closer in your direction to create an even better space for a teammate in that defender’s absence. If you see that your partner is mowing the lawn and you move the outdoor furniture and firepit out of their path so they can sustain momentum, you didn’t directly make the grass shorter, per se. You can’t take credit for the counting stat of “lawns mowed” — but undoubtedly, you’ve made the task at hand easier.
Whether it’s a defender aggressively hurtling toward the ball like a magnet possessed, a midfielder deftly working around an opponent before passing it along or a forward preparing a shot, the majority of metrics utilized in analysis focus on the moments when a player’s corporeal self collides with the ball.
There are a couple of exceptions to this on-ball bias. The predominant one comes in the context of a team’s shape: the areas that a player patrols within the defensive structure and their ability to cover ground. A buzzier one arises when attackers take offense to being denied service in the final third. In MLS, the most notable example from this season came when Los Angeles FC hosted Lionel Messi and Inter Miami. Denis Bouanga had stars in his eyes, dribbling mazes around the Miami defense to set up his shot — even at the expense of former MVP Carlos Vela, who couldn’t hide his dismay at one stage.
LAFC vs Inter Miami, September 3, 2023
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— jr_gifs (@jr_gifs) November 3, 2023
A continent and an ocean away, another prolific goalscorer is bad at hiding his ire about unsatisfactory service. As Erling Haaland adjusted following his move to Manchester City, his waving arms and Norske barks piqued the interest of FootballViz, part of Ellipse, a London-based sports data and analytics company that already gathered spatial insights about cricket, horse racing, rugby and tennis. At a time when many were dissecting whether or not his trademark off-ball running jived with Pep Guardiola’s system, Ellipse wanted to translate their expertise to soccer.
“On a wider level, we feel there’s a missing narrative,” FootballViz data scientist Freddie Wilson told The Athletic. “There are less than two minutes per game where a player is actually on the ball, so when you focus on pure event data, you miss the majority of what a player does. To get a more realistic view of how a player contributes to a team, how a team sets up and what sort of style they’re playing, being able to consider these off-the-ball movements goes some way towards completing this picture.”
Working off a variety of tracking and event data sources, FootballViz collaborates with SportsDynamics to track the number of spaces that are opened by a player without the ball throughout a match — moments that, according to Wilson, “whether you’re in stadium or watching in a pub, get a crowd excited” about the potential build-up. Another data scientist at FootballViz, Dawid Zdarzil, clarified that the model takes into account velocity, distance from opposing players, and the flow of play.
“We’re able to apply a lot of additional context around those intricate movements that players make,” Zdarzil said. “By focusing not only on the distance between players but also their movement around one another, we’re able to identify those critical moments on the pitch. For example, if a defender is drawn towards the ball or overcommits on an attempted interception, we can capture any player who seeks to exploit that vacated space.
“These insights allow us to understand what makes the elite players so instrumental but also highlights those unsung heroes or valuable under-the-radar individuals who are still playing an important role but may not top the traditional stat sheets.”
Guys like Gressel.
Having already looked at the on-ball bits that Gressel provides above, FootballViz’s data helps fill out the remaining 97.8% of his workload. They track the number of spaces opened and assign them to areas of the pitch: the “danger zone” around the box, “between the lines” of defense, behind the defensive line, switches of play and on either wing. Sorting open spaces among these distinctions helps us better understand where Gressel and others are being asked to roam when the ball is with a teammate.
Playing wider with Columbus has caused the number of spaces open on the right wing to skyrocket, although Gressel still ranked 73rd in MLS during his days with Vancouver in a more central role. That 57.23 clip is top in MLS by some margin, well ahead of second-ranked Crew teammate Mohamed Farsi, whose 38.65 spaces open down the right wing still considerably outpace the league’s third most-prolific player (Alex Roldan with the Seattle Sounders, 28.5). Gressel is also far more likely to open space behind the defensive line in his current role than he was earlier in the year.
His sheer drop in total spaces open across all categories during his time with Vancouver stands out, too, with the midfield as congested of an area as any on the pitch. With so many players conglomerated into one zone, the instances of truly being in open space are more sparse than you’ll find on the wing and in the attacking third.
In general, Columbus is a space-opening machine. Yaw Yeboah leads the league down the left wing with 39.14 spaces opened. Diego Rossi and Jacen Russell-Rowe rank 3rd and 4th in the danger zone, while Gressel trails only Xande Silva in opening space behind the defensive line.
FootballViz is also able to discern how often a player receives the ball from a teammate when in an open space. To stick with Gressel as an example, of the 15.75 times per 90 minutes he opens space behind a defensive line, his Columbus teammates have gotten him the ball 79.7% of the time (an average of 12.5 times per 90 minutes). Although that’s a high bar from a rate perspective, the 3.2 times per 90 that his teammates aren’t playing the ball to him when he’s in space is also the highest number of times per 90 of any MLS player. In second: Billy Sharp, at 3.1 times per 90 (32.4% of the time he opens space behind the defense).
In the Crew’s 2-0 series-opening win against Atlanta United in the MLS Cup Playoffs, Columbus opened 58 spaces behind the defensive line — the highest tally of any team in the first week of the first round. The opening goal, scored by Hernández, came after he opened space behind Atlanta’s defense, an example of this exercise being brought to life.
That goal, plus a penalty kick to complete his brace, helped the Crew win the opener. Atlanta stormed back with impressive goals (and an impressive miss) to win the leg by a 4-2 margin. Thiago Almada’s return from red card suspension was vital for Atlanta, but don’t discount the team’s off-ball improvement.
Compared to the 44 spaces Atlanta found behind the Columbus backline in the first game, Atlanta found far more on home soil — a total of 74, to be exact. Almada’s on-ball wizardry won him the young player of the year award, and he was on the ball 25 times when teammates found space beyond the backline — the third-highest single-game output of 2023. It isn’t the type of stat that’ll supplant his goal and assist output, but it helps show what opportunities are afforded to his teammates given the additional defensive focus on a young World Cup champion.
A player may only have the ball at their feet for under two minutes, but that doesn’t mean the rest of their time on the field is worthless. By tracking off-ball metrics like opened spaces and how often those runs are met with a pass, we’re able to further understand what exactly players are doing when the cameras don’t have them in focus.
For Columbus, Gressel was once again prolific off the ball. He led all players on both teams in total attacking spaces found, doing so 33 times (more than his game one total of 29). It’s particularly impressive given the fact that his shift in Atlanta ended after 80 minutes.
For the first time since leaving Atlanta, Gressel has a real shot of winning MLS Cup. His work off the ball will go a long way toward the Crew’s hope of achieving that goal.
( Photo: Kirk Irwin/Getty Images)