How Good was David Beckham was one of the most famous and respected soccer players of all time.
Introduction
The name David Beckham evokes strong emotional reactions in people. Especially in the UK, she’s either one of your childhood heroes or she’s an over-the-top, overpaid prima donna. There is no middle ground.
He is vastly overrated or underrated. People aren’t quite sure.
How Good was David Beckham but we have a strong opinion either way. It’s important to draw your lines and stick to them, even if the only evidence we have is half-remembered games from 20 years ago.
How reliable is one’s opinion about players from 20 years ago? I know I can’t be particularly reliable, I was in elementary school when Beckham was at his peak.
How Good was David Beckham i thought it would be fun to look at some data to provide some evidence for his abilities and then add some color with some video analysis.
How Good was David Beckham (and could he have played another position?)
Information
The obvious problem is that data for the 90s and early 00s is largely unavailable. How Good was David Beckham thanks to Fbref, I was able to pull some targets and assist data, getting a few minutes of game shooting data.
The question I wanted to answer with this information is, how does David Beckham compare to the best midfielders of his era and the PL midfielders we know now?
Select a player to view
How Good was David Beckham it is important to note here that this piece was not particularly scientific. The selection process was incredibly manual and a mix between my own memories of the late 90s/early 00s and the Ballon d’O nominees… Some of the top players who played in his era were in roughly the same position.
I wanted players who often played wide in a midfield 4… but also played something for fun (eg, Veron – to be fair he played wide in a 4-4-2 early in his career).
To find players in the current Premier League, I initially filtered by high crossing volume and to highlight players who frequently drop the ball into the box from wide areas.
How Good was David Beckham this list then tried to exclude different types of players, Sterling and Salah – who operate as wide forwards rather than midfielders. Kevin De Bruyne is a player who has been compared to Beckham for his last ball and devilish whip. And, like Zidane, a player who plays centrally, but often pops up in wide areas.
Gylfi Sigurdsson is there for his set piece skills. I thought it might appeal to the “Beckham’s just a set piece merchant” brigade.
I’m sure there are some incredibly obvious wide midfielders I’ve missed, and some names you might think shouldn’t be there. But it gives us at least a decent idea, and some useful reference points.
How Good was David Beckham (and could he have played another position?)
method
Data was scraped from Fbref for each selected player and then compiled into a table in Excel. Each player’s best season (in terms of goals and assists per 90 minutes) was selected before and after the season to form a 3-season average.
How Good was David Beckham the rationale behind this was that it would provide some semblance of consistency, or at least avoid overrating any one-season wonders. Sometimes a little common sense had to be used.
David Ginola had 3 really consistent seasons of data, one of them would have been missed if I had used the previous method to the letter and I would have included a season where he only had 20 starts and his numbers were much lower.
Denilson’s tenure spanned four seasons with the exception of the 2000–2001 season, which the Brazilian missed entirely due to injury. Harvey Barnes and Dwight McNeill only have 2-season averages, because without stating the obvious, they were only in the Premier League for 2 seasons and Jack Grealish’s numbers are all from this season.
result
First, a single-axis scatter that plots each player’s combined goals and assists per 90 minutes (G+A p90).
I have to say, I didn’t expect to see Beckham so high up here. He is the second-best player in the data set in this regard, behind only the brilliant, and perhaps underrated himself, Robert Pires.
0.78 G+A p90 is really, really good. For context, that’s better than Manchester City superstar Kevin De Bruyne’s 0.71, which may come as a bit of a surprise.
A word here for Theo Walcott, 0.74 G+A p90 and 3rd best in the data set. For reference, it was also between 21-23 years. May deserve some more respect for what has been a fantastic career.
The boxplot you see overlaid on the chart displays the two extremes of the data (Redmond and Pires) as well as the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles.
The next chart is a table of total minutes played by each player