The Not-So-Beautiful Game: Socceroos in the World Cup

November 3, 2022

Australia has not historically fielded a competitive soccer team (sorry, it's the Socceroos, not the Footballroos). In recent years that's been changing, for both men's and women's sides.

In spite of the improvement, we're known more for our physicality than the aesthetics of our game.

(Australia are) an opponent often summed up by the adjective "difficult", if not brilliant.

- Le Monde

As a casual fan it feels like we almost never actually have possession of the ball, and yet we manage to squeeze the wins out. I want to see if our "ugly success" is an outlier. Unfortunately I couldn't get data earlier than 2010, and 2006 was the year I was most curious about.

Since 2010, the data does show the Socceroos 2022 result to be a pretty crazy outlier, with just 37.8% possession and 6 points.

How do the winners and runners up look?

🤷‍♂️ Looks like they're all around 48-57% possession, so there's a slight positive correlation, but nothing crazy. I find it shocking that the data from 2006 and earlier isn't easier to find, but I'm mostly curious about it because it's the year we were 1 away from the quarters.