What You Probably Don’t Know About Crossing

Crossing & finishing is one of the most common attacking drills in football. It’s also something that can be practiced easily in your own time with just two players and a ball. But anybody who has taken one of PlayerTech’s Position-Specific Programs will know that relying on crossing to create and score goals might not be the best way to go!

In fact, crossing & heading is such a hot topic, we have a whole section of our Player Programs dedicated to it.

Did you know in recent years, crossing is declining as data analytics is helping clubs understand how and why goals are scored? Many top data analysts even go as far to say that crossing too often means your team is more likely to concede goals than score them.

Think about some of the very top clubs and players in the world. Barcelona are not crossing the ball for Messi to score headers, and Man City do not rely on Sergio Aguero to beat defenders in the air! How may headers do Salah, Mane, Sterling, Kane, & Vardy score? The answer is not many.

Good teams and good players cross less often than weaker teams and players.

PlayerTech was created to bring the data analytics used by all the teams in the Premier League to regular players who aren’t s lucky to have this provided for them.

Below is a map of how many crosses it takes to score a goal from the top 5 leagues in Europe in 2019/2020. That’s more than 60,000 crosses!

Using this information we can begin to change our habits and make better decisions. Do you notice how the areas just inside the box, closer to goal are far more dangerous than crosses from out wide?

Now lets take a look at some examples of crossing situations in the Premier League using a video which is included in our Position-Specific Programs for Wingers, Strikers and Midfielders….

So what does this mean for players who want to improve?

If we’re crossing the ball too often from out wide and wondering why we aren’t getting assists, it might be time to make some different decisions about when and where to cross. Can we combine with teammates to get into better positions?

What are we doing in training? If we’re constantly working on crossing like this, it’s no surprise we aren’t seeing results. PlayerTech we are lucky to have this data on almost any professional league around the world, and this information on crossing is the same at all levels of professional and most amateur football.

We also work privately with a number of professional players which you can read about here. We help them work on training in their own time, and changing the way they play to become more dangerous. This is how and why we built the player programs, and below you can see one of success stories.

And finally, it might be time to do things a bit differently when you train on your own. Our Position Specific Programs include clips of elite players like Vardy, Foden Rashford, Kane and many more in training. We teach you the skills and knowledge you need to train smarter in your own time.

 

To find out more about PlayerTech’s Programs for Players, check out our home page!

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