Off again, on-off again
Has Toni Kroos secretly been holding Real Madrid back?
Why do the numbers show that Real Madrid do better without Toni Kroos?
Toni Kroos is going to retire at the end of the summer. This is sad news for anyone who loves silky press resistance and immaculate passing in midfield, no matter how sick you are of seeing Real Madrid win.
But what if Kroos, for all his talent and absurd trophy haul, was actually keeping his team from winning even more?
I wrote about a weird stats thing:
Madrid have always done better when Kroos isn’t on the pitch.
Seriously, you can look this up in FBref’s playing-time tables. In his decade in La Liga, the columns labelled “on-off” show that his team have had a better goal difference with him than without him only once — just barely, last season — and that was actually his worst campaign in terms of expected goal difference, according to which Madrid have been better without Kroos in every year on record.
Is it possible that one of the most admired midfielders of his generation has been secretly holding his team back all along?
Those on-off numbers might be a red flag in a sport like hockey or basketball, where teams make a lot more subs and play a lot more games, but soccer’s low-scoring, low-subbing nature makes it tough to isolate one player’s impact on the scoreline.
In search of the truth about Kroos, I talked to some smart people who have been working on different approaches to adapting an adjusted plus-minus framework to soccer: a Norwegian professor named Lars Magnus Hvattum, Goalimpact’s Patrick May, and the Washington Spirit data analyst Edvin Tran Hoac.
Did they solve the mystery? Not exactly — I can confidently reveal that Kroos’s true level is somewhere between “second-league player” and “literally better than Messi.” But I learned a lot about top-down player ratings and came away more curious about their potential in soccer than I was before. Hope you enjoy.