Crossing in the A-League: Where’s it gone?

I listened to the June 23rd episode of the Fox Football Podcast (Adam and Robbie chat new broadcast deal), in which a question was asked about crossing.

Saw one of Robbie's crosses from a past socceroos match where it whizzed in with a lot of power. Why don't we see enough of that today with Aussies? Has the game changed or has the individual standard dropped?

— Leigh Broxham Facts (@TheBroxFacts) June 23, 2020

The answer that Robbie Slater gave was a bit more philosophical (we’ve coached it out of players in Australia), and also looked at the ‘good old days’ of crossing into the big man up top.

I decided to see if I could get any insight from looking into the last 5 years of A-League data to see if I could answer Adam Peacock’s question: crossing - where’s it gone?

Crossing: It’s gone up!

Surprisingly, the data shows that in the A-League, crossing has actually increased over the past 5 years. This is shown in total number of crosses:

…and also reflects in crosses per 90 minutes:

Crossing accuracy has also markedly increased this season.

Maybe it’s got something to do with an increase in crosses into the 6-yard box?

How does this compare with the European leagues?

The Big 5 European leagues do not share the same trend that the A-League has had over the past five years - in fact they’ve generally been trending downwards.

Teams’ playing styles

With this data, I also created a visualisation of teams’ playing styles based on crosses and goals scored. The lines represent the 33rd and 66th percentiles, meaning the middle bands are the averages. To provide a bit more context, I've categorised groups into the following:

So, where has crossing gone?

So to answer the question, crossing is on the up in the A-League over the past five years. Of course, this doesn’t address the longer timeframes of when Robbie Slater was playing, and also doesn’t address the wider tactical reasoning behind why crossing may have decreased since then.

This analysis of goalscoring effectiveness and efficiency is a bit of a simplification as there are more ways to score than through crossing. Further analysis might be done looking at a longer time frame, productive crosses (does a cross result in a shooting opportunity?), type of cross (set piece, cut-back across the box, deep cross, aerial vs low), crosses vs penetrative passes (what is the relative effectiveness of a team’s crossing vs their penetrative passing?), game state (is crossing more frequent when a team is losing?), home vs away stats (do teams cross more/less when home/away?), overlaying xG and xA onto crosses, defensive situation (counterattack vs positional defence?).