Vibes vs. data at the World Cup
The most successful South American team actually plays a highly optimised, European style of football.
At the end of June I bookmarked a post on the site formerly known as Twitter that immediately piqued my interest. Not because it was "excellent analysis of how metrics lead to unintended emergent results", as one person put it; but because it was almost certainly wrong.
The core of the claim was that in this World Cup "European possession-heavy teams" have struggled against "South American sides [that] are comfortable without possession because they know football matches are decided by moments, not possession statistics".
Apparently, in South American nations "the 1v1 remained sacred. so did the tactical foul, the unpredictable dribble, and the player willing to lose possession five times if the sixth breaks the match open".
By contrast, European nations have been over-analysing the sport, leading to a situation where "a generation of coaches optimised for pass completion, pressing triggers, territorial control, rest defence, and positional occupation".
I didn't want to respond last week because it was too early in the tournament. But now that we're in the quarter-final phase, I thought I'd take a look at the actual data, rather than relying on vibes dressed up as "excellent analysis".
First, the premise. In this tournament, have European sites really played possession-heavy football, with South American teams preferring to rely on dribbles, duels, and the counter? A quick search revealed that Fotmob had the data for all three, and after briefly considering painstakingly scraping each individual match myself, I did what all the kids (should) be doing: fired up an AI console, planned the strategy with an AI agent (OpenCode and DeepSeek v4 Pro in this case), and got it to build a Python script to scrape only the data I wanted into a local CSV file.
After verifying the data against the source, I had it build three charts:
You'll notice that I split Argentina out of CONMEBOL. That's because Argentina – winners of the 2021, 2024 Copa America Cup and 2022 World Cup, and the only non-European country to have won a World Cup since 2002 – play a style of football that's much more "European" than even the average UEFA country!
I probably didn't need to go to such lengths to disprove the tweet at the start of this post. It's clear to anyone who has been watching this World Cup that the most successful teams play a distinctly European style of football: high possession and pass completion, strong tackles, pressing triggers, territorial control, rest defence, and positional occupation.
You might like the vibes of the free-flowing, counter-attacking, high-risk and high-reward South American style. But it's the highly optimised, strategic European style of football that tends to win trophies.
