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For the new subscribers: Back in March, I put a call out for coronavirus-relief donations. Anyone who sent me a receipt for one got to assign me a newsletter topic of their choosing. I’m still working my way through the assignments, and so today’s topic comes from Sam, who asked me to write about Barcelona’s Gerard Pique.
There are two constants in the modern era of Barcelona FC: Lionel Messi and Gerard Pique. Messi is, well, Messi: an omnipotent, all-time great attacking force who isn’t just the best player of his era. No, he legitimately might be the best shooter, best passer, best dribbler, best creator, best free-kick taker, and best scorer of his era. He’s LeBron James, shrunk down in size but not in impact. At 33, he still might be the best player alive.
Pique, on the other hand, has eased into an expected decline. Defenders usually age a little more gracefully than attackers, but 33 is the downside for everyone. Despite his presence at the heart of the most dominant club team and national team of this era, Pique’s prominence never really seemed to peak at any point. His compatriot Sergio Ramos is a year older, but the Real captain’s reputation has mainly seemed to improve with time, while Pique’s has gone in the opposite direction. The Guardian’s annual ranking of the top 100 players in the world is the best answer we have for the question of “how good do people think this guy is?”, and here’s how the two have compared since 2012:
This is as far back as the rankings go, and it would be interesting to see where Pique ranked during the Pep Guardiola era, when Barcelona won two Champions League titles in three years. Per FBRef, he was in the FIFPro World XI each year from 2010 through 2012, and the same goes for the UEFA Team of the Year. In 2010-11, as a 23 year old, he won the La Liga Defender of the Year award. In essence, he’d already won everything -- multiple league trophies, the World Cup, the Euros, multiple Champions Leagues -- before he’d even entered his prime. If there’s a path to becoming “the greatest center back of all time”, then it absolutely looks pretty similar to the one Pique was on. After conquering every competition, he entered what were supposed to be the best years of his career ... and he just sort of tapered off, settled into the realm of “one of the better defenders in the world” and never really re-achieved or built on the acclaim he’d earned in his early 20s.
What happened? While Messi hasn’t really changed at all amidst Barcelona’s slow, self-inflicted demise, Pique’s become a mirror for it.
For a while, I believed that center backs were mainly just products of their systems. Guys like John Terry and Diego Godin looked great ... because they got to play under Jose Mourinho and Diego Simeone, both of whom prioritized defensive structure and allowed their CBs to make plays on balls in the air. Meanwhile, someone like, say, Vincent Kompany (or, if you caught me on the right day, Dejan Lovren) could consistently look terrible because of the high line he was being asked to hold and all the space he had to cover between himself and the goal. It’s much easier to be reactive than proactive, but it all depends on what your manager asks you to do.
Then Virgil Van Dijk and Aymeric Laporte arrived in Liverpool and Manchester, and both seemed to immediately transform their teams from sides that allowed a small number of high-quality opportunities and into elite defensive behemoths that suppressed both the quality and quantity of chances they conceded. The importance of VVD seems widely accepted, and Laporte’s seemed to be proven by this past season: He got hurt, and City suddenly started conceding all those great chances once again.
The reality, though, is probably somewhere between the two. Liverpool’s defense had started to improve before Van Dijk was fully integrated into the team, and the presence of arguably the best keeper in the world behind him and a conservative midfield in front certainly played a role, too. Meanwhile, with Laporte back in the lineup last week against Chelsea, City conceded 14 shots -- a lot -- and 3.1 expected goals -- a hell of a lot -- in the loss that sealed the title for Liverpool.
Pique, meanwhile, seemed to be playing his best back when Barca were at their most aggressive, and the same holds true for the team itself. Here’s the progression of their pressing aggression since the 09-10 season, determined by Passes allowed Per Defensive Action (PPDA). The lower the number, the more aggressive the team is:
The performance of the defense has roughly followed the same pattern:
Basically, it’s absurd dominance in the initial Guardiola years, then a decline, then a sudden improvement under Luis Enrique (starting in 14-15), and then a decline to levels where the data label won’t even fit on the graph. Pique’s place on the Guardian’s list follows a similar pattern: He rates as a top-40 player at the tail end of Pep’s tenure, then nearly gets ejected of the list completely, before recovering back down to a top-40 slot under Enrique, and then suddenly dropping once again down to the outer reaches of the list. The accolades track that path, too: another FIFPro award in 2016, and spots on the UEFA Teams of the Year in 2015 and 2016.
The biggest change in Pique’s game over time has been the amount of on-ball defending he’s done. The past three seasons have produced the three lowest rates of tackles and interceptions per 90 minutes, adjusted for possession. In fact, these match up reasonably well with all of the other charts you’ve already seen, too -- high under Guardiola, a dip, a tick back up under Enrique, and then a steady decline since:
Now, active defending doesn’t necessarily equal effective defending for everyone, but given the decline of Barca’s defense over time, it seems safe to say that for Pique active defending was effective defending. There likely were some systemic factors behind the decline -- Enrique left after 16-17 -- but Pique’s activity completely dropped off right at his age-30 season. That easiest explanation: he got old. However, now he’s contesting a much higher number of aerial duels than he did at the beginning of his career -- two per 90 in 08-09, 4.8 this season -- and he’s winning a much larger chunk of them, too: from 56 percent that first year, up to 71 percent this season. Per the site Smarterscout, Pique ranks right around the 60th percentile among center backs both in terms of how often he’s contesting headers and how likely he is to win them.
While Pique isn’t a particularly dangerous passer -- he’s not breaking through lines of the opposing defense or moving the ball upfield in a hard-to-replace way -- he does rarely lose the ball. That, along with his ability to carry the ball at his feet from the back, are the two spots where he provides the most offensive value. Per the site Smarterscout, there are only a handful of other centerbacks the big five leagues who have matched Pique’s aerial-duel rating and also rated at 85 or above for ball retention and 80 or above for dribble frequency since 2016-17: Thiago Silva at PSG, Robin Le Normand at Real Sociedad, Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger, and then the Manchester City trio of Laporte, Nicolas Otamendi, and John Stones. Look up “mixed bag” if for some reason you own a strange dictionary that defines phrases like that, and you’ll see the previous sentence.
The simple story is this: Pique was a fantastic defender for a fantastic team. He might not have truly driven results like a Ramos, who constantly cleans up the mistakes of his teammates and consistently comes through on the offensive end. He’s scored 59 non-penalty goals and assisted 26 more in La Liga, while Pique’s on 30 and six. And Pique has never quite had a transformational effect on a team in the way that Van Dijk did with Liverpool. Maybe his teammates were always too good for that to happen, and maybe this is all just branding, but Pique seems more like a piece of a system, while Van Dijk and Ramos are players you build your systems around.
At 33, he’s not the same player he once was; he has 44,213 minutes of club soccer on those legs, plus plenty of time for Spain, too. And yet somehow he’s played the most minutes of any outfield player for Barcelona this year. The team has slumped to its lowest Elo rating since the early Guardiola days, and they’re now two points back of Real Madrid in the La Liga table. Among 14 players with at least 1,000 league minutes, half of them are in their 30s -- and one of the ones who isn’t just got shipped to Turin in exchange for another 30-year-old. Pique’s just a symbol for everything else that’s going on, like he’s always been.