An athlete who feels he is underappreciated can sulk, sound off to the media, or go on a Twitter rant. Or he can invent a new statistic that proves his worth.
That’s what two defensive midfielders did, and now their invention is the talk of soccer’s statistics world.
Stefan Reinartz and Jens Hegeler were defensive midfielders in the Bundesliga in 2015 when they created the metric known as packing. The rudimentary statistics in soccer, like goals and assists, cast favorable light primarily on strikers and attacking midfielders, the players who do most of the scoring and assisting.